Abstract
The article employs music to describe the dynamics of Central European identity at the turn of the 20th century. Conceptually, the analysis is based on the notion of cultural resonance and the distinction between political territories, which isolate identity, and cultural landscapes which let it escape. This theoretical understanding is derived from the acoustic philosophy and musical practice of two Central European composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók. Exemplified here is artistic ‘extra-territorial’ identity, which is indeed how Theodor Adorno at one point referred to the ‘peripheral’ sound coming from the region. This process of identity construction amplifies paradoxical middle spaces, which Jean Luc Nancy describes evocatively as a cultural mêlée. The vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by this primary contact with mundane reality and the ‘navigational hesitation’ underpinning identity and its many trajectories.
Attempting to capture the sense of Central European consciousness, György Konrád (1984) recalls an amusing anecdote that made its rounds during the Cold War. Upon taking up his post, the ambassador of the Mongolian People’s Republic released an official communiqué to the Hungarian people, apologizing in the name of his government for Genghis Khan’s invasion, which nearly destroyed the country in 1241 (1984: 78). This charming story not only illustrates the way national memory at a specific moment becomes a personal recollection, but especially how seemingly distant and forgotten events are never completely settled. Carried into a new context, the past is amplified, rearticulated in its factuality – inserted into the active range of perception that directly touches the present. This is how, Konrád continues, we find ‘traces in us of conqueror and conquered, Finno-Ugrians, Bulgars, Khazars, Slavs, Pechenegs, Cumans, Tartars, Romanians, Turks, Germans, Jews, Serbs, Slovaks, Russians, Greeks, gypsies [and] what is a Hungarian, anyway?’ (1984: 132).
This elementary but always startling question when national identity comes into play strikes at the heart of how cultural spaces saturated by their past are not simply memories of what took place, but structural components which underpin contemporary realities. Cultural distinctiveness is but a fragment of a much larger temporal universe, which often comes to the surface as an after-thought – in the wake of specific and largely unpredictable circumstances. Central Europe has been traditionally awash with the tension generated by its hyper-active past, which has persistently found a way to tangibly inhabit the present. Hence, as has been previously observed, the consciousness of Central Europe is not so much a matter of its perennially roughly stitched geography and politics, but a type of cultural resonance (Delanty, 1996: 96). I propose to explore this captivating juxtaposition of resonance and culture by taking the most direct approach possible, one that has been traditionally ignored by sociology as a realm that can teach us something beyond its own practice – music. More specifically, I will provide a glimpse of how two composers, Leoš Janáček and Béla Bartók, understood, collected and reworked sound at the seminal point in the history of Central Europe, around the turn of the 20th century. This particular focus is not simply motivated by the fact that musical composition, like all art, carries the historical imprint of cultural identities in which it was immersed. Above and beyond that, both Janáček and Bartók derive their unique acoustic textures from the relentless ‘land surveying’ of their local environment, eventually arriving at something like a sonic map of identity which re-imagines its geography.
Thus, my engagement with ‘cultural resonance’ works towards amplifying a regional topography that escapes or, more accurately, has always worked against the grain of politically mapped identities. The cartographic imagination of Central Europe which, well into the 19th century, included France as part of the region, and as late as 1915 extended to Greece and even Scandinavia (see Schultz and Natter, 2003), always resisted its own presence on the map.
To trace these acoustically redrawn boundaries, I will distinguish space as territory – which blossoms in the politics of nationalism – from space as landscape, which is nourished precisely by cultural resonance that extends beyond the pure matter of art, and enters into a type of dissonant discourse with the standardized definitions of identity based on the mechanics of cultural abstraction as closure.
Can musical composition, in its theory, practice and self-reflection, find the unified picture of reality in its essentially diverse textures? Does it have enough empirical density to be ‘able to describe landscapes, narrate events, or imitate the sound of nature?’ (Jankélévitch, 2003: 39). Janáček resoundingly answers yes. Bartók will even go a step further and make these landscapes the primary element, without which no music can take hold at all.
The Paradox of the Middle
Most narratives about Central European identity usually defer to the overwhelmingly volatile chains of events which, at one point or another, tied down the entire region to its traumatic past. One tries to explicate the complexity of their history, the shifts in political understanding, the way such condensed units as a nation or a state, and the geo-political imagination on which they are based, entered the fray of unceasing corrections, deflections, adjustments, reversals of definition and fortune. Much has been learned by doing this. But cultural-historical assemblages such as the nation, the state or even the geographic descriptors of the Central Europe/Mitteleuropa variety are already highly synthesized blocs of perception. Whereas they give us the advantage of being easier to manipulate conceptually, they also require that a large portion of perceptive texture which, at a specific moment in the history of their own construction, informed and even opposed their officially displayed character, be given up. In other words, what is missing in accounting for space as a geo-political territory is precisely the much more fluid landscape of identity in its raw density.
This is how, for instance, the socio-political blueprints for Mitteleuropa gain prominence. The dynamic history of this construct has been treated extensively in the burgeoning literature on the topic (see Bugge, 1999; Chiantera-Stutte, 2008; Delanty, 1996; Le Rider 2008; Stråth, 2008). It will be enough to remind ourselves that the deliberately designed discourse of the middle of Europe gathers momentum in the 19th century, only to become fully crystallized as a political and economic plan of action more or less on the eve of the First World War. Before its confinement behind the Iron Curtain as the Eastern bloc, Mitteleuropa was the most ambitious attempt to impose a territorial identity on the entire region, which has always resisted this kind of manoeuvre, if only because of its consistently fluid and undefined frontiers.
As late as 1915, Friedrich Naumann envisaged an expansionist/colonial model for the middle of Europe, with German economic might at the helm. The idea of the ‘middle’ as the virtuous and authentic embodiment of space captured the imagination of an entire generation of intellectuals and scholars, although it did not originate at the turn of the 20th century. 1 Johan Gottfried Herder had already used such a language at the end of the 18th century, referring to der Mittelstrich der Erde or the central zone of the earth (Bugge, 1999: 19). Even though Herder was neutral as to who inhabited this ‘middle-earth’ (he spoke only of ‘well-built peoples’), this sort of designation was later firmly connected to das Deutsche Volk as the indigenous population of this swath of geography.
The discourse of Mitteleuropa embodies a philosophy and a politics of harmonization. But it is in the self-exposure of how we are ‘singular plural’ (Nancy, 2000), whose vortex has always been partially recast in black and white by the overbearing political forces which like to reduce things to their naked identity, that we must seek the resonant logic of Central Europe. The most recent revival of this search in the 1980s and the 1990s by the intellectuals and dissidents from the region moulds reality according to different frequencies of a singular past, which, as the argument goes, is perhaps more European than Europe itself. Czesław Miłosz, Vaclav Havel, György Konrád, Milan Kundera and Danilo Kiš (to mention but a few) argue from the perspective of rediscovering the common cultural core of a community which, if not at the centre, given how centres are corrupted diagrams of cultural reality, is surely in the position of intimacy or interiority in relation to Europe. Such an interior zone is found by locating a universally valid phenomenon within the otherwise politically sealed off space. This is how literature, art or the intellectually active life as ‘anti-politics’ (Konrád, 1984) reanimates the cut-off limb of lived culture, by allowing it to reach beyond its local confinement.
It is not surprising, then, that in comparison Danilo Kiš describes nationalism as the ideology of banality, in which argumentative kitsch prevails: In its Serbo-Croat variant, for instance, it is the controversy over the ethnic origin of our gingerbread hearts. … Kitsch and folklore – folk kitsch if you prefer – are nothing if not nationalism in disguise, a fertile soil for nationalist ideology … above all, nationalism is negation, a negative category of the spirit, thriving as it does on repudiation. We are not like them. (1995: 17–18)
These ‘ethnic disputes in the kitchen’ might seem like a somewhat humorous take on the struggle over cultural provenance, but the message is serious. It speaks to how identities, deposited in the arid fields of exclusivity, produce artificial and minute divisions in the textures of their past – a past that is not, nor should be, recoverable in terms of territorial origins, because lived space in tune with its local environment never really imagined itself as such.
Historically, the existential reality for most inhabitants of Central Europe has been in constant flux. Even after 1918, with the division of the region into nation-states, the primary and cosmetic difference was that such personalities as the architect Adolf Loos, Franz Kafka, Leoš Janáček or even Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, the catalyst behind the popular Pan-European movement calling for the ‘united states of Europe’, became Czechoslovak citizens. But citizenship was one thing, identity another. The latter remained poly-vocal and multi-polar, as is famously described by Ödön von Horváth in 1930: If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, I grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Pressburg [Bratislava], Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport; but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical mix of old Austria-Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary, my mother tongue is German. (quoted in Rupnik, 1990: 251)
It is interesting to note that precisely the same description of one’s ‘disassembled identity’ has been employed by Danilo Kiš as recently as the 1980s. Kiš referred to himself as a Yugoslav writing in Serbo-Croat, and spoke of his ‘destiny as a Jew from central-oriental Europe’. He also added: There are some … who think that such a destiny should precisely confer on me a feeling of identity. I do not believe any of this. Not because I am only half-Jewish but because I have lived and am still living in several cultures, in several languages, in several countries. (quoted in Le Rider, 2008: 158)
Landscapes within Territories
As late as 1949, Theodor Adorno was still able to speak of ‘extra-territoriality’ in connection to Central Europe and its art, in this case the music of Bartók and Janáček: Where the developmental tendency of occidental music was not fully carried through, as in many agrarian regions of southern Europe, it has been possible right up to the present to use tonal material without opprobrium. Mention may be made here of the extraterritorial, yet in its rigor magisterial, art of Leoš Janáček as well as much of Bartók’s [art]. … The legitimation of such music from the periphery in every case depends on its having developed a coherent and selective technical canon. In contrast to the productions of Nazi blood-and-soil ideology, truly extraterritorial music – whose material, while common in itself, is organized in a totally different way from occidental music – has the power of alienation that associates it with the avant-garde and not with nationalistic reaction. (Adorno, 2006 [1949]: 176, my emphasis)
Fittingly, Adorno speaks of the periphery in the margins of a footnote. The typical, conceptual buffers that distance leading cultures (in this case the German, classical tradition of music) from their offshoots are clearly heard. But there is much more to Adorno’s off-hand statement, for it touches the raw logic of spatial construction which escapes the callipers of ideological, territorial standardization.
Territories are physical and conceptual enclosures. They demand devotion, being connected to the earth (terra) and, by association, to the discourse of ‘blood and soil’. They also inspire exclusivity and protection of land (terre ‘to frighten’), even though this second etymological origin is more tenuous (Elden, 2010: 806). One is always placed in a territory, whose dimensions must be ferociously guarded. The effect of this state of affairs is all too well known: territories are not pre-given, but produced and engineered. They are abstract representations of space, which ‘intervene in and modify spatial textures’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 42). But this almost instinctive feeling for a territory as bounded space, which nationalism was especially successful in utilizing, also calls out for re-texturing of its ‘self-devoted alienation’ (Konrád, 1984: 194). One way of doing this is to understand territories in terms of landscapes. Georg Simmel’s (2007 [1913]) reflections on the topic will prove to be of help here, especially because, as is usually the case with Simmel, he starts with the most basic cultural act – the moment of conscious perception.
A landscape is a framed description of how, in a manner of speaking, the indifference of space is sculpted by perception. It is true that this form of engagement is already an act which diminishes diversity as it re-assembles space into a synthesized image. This is the way culture reworks the reality of its own embedded placement, but left to its own devices, it stops short of complete spatial exclusivity.
Accordingly, ‘for there to be a landscape, our consciousness has to acquire a wholeness, a unity, over and above its component elements’ (Simmel, 2007 [1913]: 21). Landscapes are an epiphenomenon of a synthesis which effectively estranges us from the monotony and the vastness of nature. As such, they are ‘a self-contained perception intuited as a self-sufficient unity, which is nevertheless intermeshed with an infinite expansiveness and a continual flux’ (Simmel, 2007 [1913]: 22). Teeming with life, landscapes are what Henri Lefebvre in turn describes as representational spaces, which have ‘an affective kernel or centre: Ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house; or: square, church, graveyard’. Moreover, they ‘embrace the loci of passion, of action and lived situations, and thus immediately [imply] time’ (1991: 42).
When landscapes lose or are divested of this feeling for infinite expansiveness, which must still be present even in the field of their already diminished amplitude, they become territories. In this sense, territories are overly reified, one-dimensional ‘landscapes’, calling out for a nation, an origin and a set history. If landscapes, through the act of ‘singling-out’ must to some extent individualize, bestowing partial frontiers on space, they cannot go too far in this exercise, given how diversity works through them: The raw material of landscape provided by bare nature is so infinitely varied and changes from case to case. Consequently, the points of view and the forms that compose its elements into a sense-perceptual unity will also be highly variable. (Simmel, 2007 [1913]: 23)
Diversity must be continually gathered and re-composed. It ‘cannot be expressed through mechanical analogies’ (Simmel, 2007 [1913]: 28) like the paralysing effect of borders and frontiers, which attempt to fuse perception to the hermetically sealed-off space. When successful, such compressed perception constitutes the most basic identity of territories, which, in their fully developed form, become political technologies (Elden, 2010).
Through ‘extra-territoriality’, Adorno captures the variability of this under-harmonized, poly-vocal resonance of space. It is here, in this peripheral zone, doubly so because we are speaking of Central Europe in relation to Europe as one periphery and the art of sound in relation to national identities as the second one, where the essential questions about the region and cultural identity in general emerge. Is it possible that this balancing act, this ‘extra’ in territoriality, lies precisely in the inevitable, self-effacing condition which deflects mono-vocal identities into a series of augmentations, inversions and disarticulations? And if so, how can we attempt to approach all these shifts in a coherent way?
Adorno’s ‘extra-territoriality’ expels the art of the ‘South’ (as he refers to the region) from the Occident. In a sense, Central Europe is allowed to ‘fall out’ of history. As such, it might even be experiencing nothing less than the moment of tragedy the Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1984) famously proclaimed. As Kundera argues, the malady of Central Europe is actually the drama of the West, where culture as such, which knows or at least should know nothing about geographic territories, bows out, leaving the stage of the common, European history (Kundera, 1984). Such accounting for the recent past mourns the practical injustice of the already lost cultural landscape that did not distinguish between East and West. But ‘extra-territoriality’ can also be the catalyst through which identities are recovered, where peripheries unmask the disingenuous ‘stitch-up job’ of centres which merely collect diversity in the indifferent manner of a paper clip, loosely binding several pages together.
In the first instance, then, ‘extra-territoriality’ is what remains of landscapes in homogenized spaces – the prefix denoting the landscaping logic without which territories could not arise, but also a periphery which now is not only superfluous but also a challenge. What remains of landscapes within territories is the opening, the outside which must be excluded if the neatly drawn dimensions of completed enclosures are to be preserved. As such, ‘extra-territoriality’ is the lingering fragment of a landscape. This fragment constitutes a sort of phantom presence – the logic of territories’ own creation, which, while it cannot be completely expelled, is shoved over to the side, as far away from ‘authenticity’ as is possible. The irony is that because of this now marginal position, the logic of landscapes as that ‘extra’ element within space, unleashes the corrosive force of destabilizing contrast: Thus, despite – or because of – its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space … [a] ‘differential space’, because inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences. (Lefebvre, 1991: 52)
Being in the Midst: Leoš Janáček
On his first visit to England in 1926, Leoš Janáček clearly felt the contradiction between territories and landscapes. First, he referred to Czechoslovakia, newly created just a mere eight years before, in the following terms: ‘We are a nation that has to mean something in the world! We are the heart of Europe! And this heart must be felt in Europe!’ (1989: 59). Only two days later, still in London speaking at the Czechoslovak Club, Janáček made a much more provocative statement, evoking the universal logic of cultural landscapes: If I took a Czech, or an English, French or any other folk song, and did not know that it is a Czech, an English or a French song, I could not tell what belongs to whom. Folk song has one spirit, because it possesses the pure man, with God’s own culture, and not the one grafted upon him. Therefore I think that if our art music can grow out of this folk source, all of us will embrace each other in these products of art music. It will become common to all of us; it will unite us. Folk song can bind the nation – indeed nations – can bind all of mankind into one spirit, one kind of happiness, one kind of bliss. (1989: 60–1, my emphasis)
These are abstract and even problematic equivocations. But the crux of the matter here is not the uncanny idealism, or even mysticism of what is said. The crucial aspect is the seriousness of intent to express a unique type of universalism found in the microcosm of regional intimacy, something Janáček and Bartók elevated to the principle on which their music is based – a phenomenon that did not escape Adorno’s notice.
Janáček pursues this type of ‘extra-territoriality’ in sound. Through it, he attempts to refine local aural realties of his native Moravia into acoustic patterns which preserve their identity, while launching them into the orbit of something commonly shared. He thus operates in a transition or a frontier zone beyond which art, if pushed one step further, ‘simply reabsorbs itself into reality’ (Jankélévitch, 2003: 37). In other words, this zone is a field of amplified perception without which identity sinks back into the monotonous drone of mere geography. Expressed here is the logic of landscapes in their cultural intimacy, afflicted as they are by ‘a phobia about the pathos of lingering’ (Jankélévitch, 2003: 44) – a type of indecisive stasis which ‘on the one hand condemns insistence, on the other, complacency’ (Jankélévitch, 2003: 45).
The contradiction in Janáček’s speech given on 1 May, which ‘cardio-logically’ exposes the newly created Czechoslovakia as the ‘heart of Europe’, and the one delivered on 3 May, asking that this uniquely national heart, which many would search for and find precisely in the folk-song, must be given up, is more subtle than any literal reading of its inconsistency. It would seem that the placement at the heart of Europe demands a de-sensitized organ, a space of ‘affected indifference’ (Jankélévitch, 2003: 42), which is in some form outside its own cultural viscera, thus creating an entity whose embodiment culminates in a momentary ‘cardiac arrest’, culturally speaking. Life is multi-faceted. It ‘has so many ingredients! So many beautiful moments! Let us take them up. All of them must be dealt with. We, being here truly in the heart of Europe, cannot take a lyre and just strum away!’ (Janáček, 1989: 123).
And, in fact, Janáček does attempt to deal with as many of these ingredients as he is able to by perpetuating a general arrhythmia of perception, through a series of displacements. First, by saying that ‘folk song is not everything [because] there is also language’ (1989: 61) and then concluding, even more radically, that music which depends only on the acoustic quality of sound is not what it claims to be. Pure acoustics (as practised by Schoenberg, for instance) lacks existential vitality: ‘Music which depends just on notes … ignores man and his surroundings. … I can only laugh at those who come out with only the acoustic quality of music’ (1989: 61).
On the most fundamental level, Janáček practises a type of materialism through sound, which is based on the ‘rough talk of the elements’ (1989: 107). He attaches to this ‘discursive materiality’ the famous label of speech-melody which, simply stated, is the recorded (in standard musical notation) ‘sonic-signature’ of existential moments in various contexts. Janáček starts collecting these sound-bites around 1885, and continues doing so throughout his life.
Speech-melodies (nápěvky mluvy) are the acoustic components of reality at large. As such, they are expressions ‘clinging to life [and] erupting out of life itself’ (1989: 98); or, to put it in a different way, they are a natural layer of acoustic truth-statements: ‘A speech-melody is a faithful momentary musical expression of a human being; it is his soul and all his being like a photograph of the moment’ (as quoted in Tyrell, 2006: 478). And even if Janáček does not use speech-melodies piece-meal in his compositions, describing this practice, which was imputed to him, as nonsense (1989: 91), they are by no means merely incidental to his art.
Speech-melodies are a type of ‘sonic probe’, allowing a glimpse of what lies behind sound as such. Janáček thus searches for the extra element in the identity of various phenomena and what he finds there is not only language in its raw, cultural and existential variety, but behind language, life itself. Such gained awareness, which solicits a response from the otherwise immunized consciousness, gives Janáček’s music its unmistakable and unique sonority. Its texture is an example of what Roland Barthes understands by the grain of the voice, ‘that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language – not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of its sounds-signifiers, of its letters’ (Barthes, 1977: 182).
Although Janáček’s acoustic material comes from a very confined space of Moravia, which historically has been placed in a peripheral relationship to Bohemia and its capital Prague, he is able to remap the particularity connected to a specific milieu into an extended landscape, which deterritorializes the identity of language pinned down to space, as nationalists would have it. 2 This is where sound, everyday language and social space come together as ‘the space where significations germinate from within language and in its very materiality’ (Barthes, 1977: 182), bursting through the boundaries of their confinement. Janáček’s music derives its energy from the responsive diversity of surrounding environments. Hence, acoustic phenomena are constituted by a transposition of cultural life into sound.
The Living Synthesis of East and West: Béla Bartók
‘It is curious that in music until now only enthusiasm, love, grief, or at most, distress figured as motivating causes – that is, the so-called exalted ideals’ (Bartók, as quoted in Suchoff, 2001: 68). In this and many similar observations, Bartók points towards the inner dimension in sound which came to predominate musical ‘diction’ from the end of the 18th century – its apex was the Romantic acoustics practically taken to the level of the absurd by the expressive exuberance of Wagner. Lawrence Kramer (2009: 59) refers to this orientation as the internalized drama of contemplation that goes hand in hand with the invention of the modern psyche as a psychological structure.
By the time Bartók developed his mature approach to the art of sound, he realized that something else was at stake: ‘For this reason … in contrast to the idealism manifested in the previous age, present-day musical art might be termed realistic, which without selection will sincerely and truly include every human emotion among those expressible’ (Bartók, quoted in Suchoff, 2001: 68). What was that realism of emotions in the first decades of the preceding century? In its most basic constitution, it was the search for an alternate scale of perception under the shadow of an impending disaster. One sifted through the morphology of disorienting territories for the remnants of a horizon – a process which established the region of Central Europe in the imagery of the ‘West’ as ‘the laboratory of twilight’, a ‘premonitory mirror showing the possible fate of all of Europe’ (1988: 124), as Milan Kundera evocatively describes it.
The much more crystallized sphere of politics in Hungary at the turn of the 20th century, especially in comparison to Janáček’s backyard of Moravia, created a gravitational field of discourses which was almost impossible to ignore. As soon as he moved in 1899 to Budapest from Pozsony/Pressburg (today Bratislava), Bartók was inadvertently thrown into a debate about nationalism and its authentic culture. He rebelled almost immediately against the standard national ideologies which elevated the gentry and the aristocracy to the position of the self-appointed custodians of national culture and its memory, describing such rhetoric as foreign to the genuine Magyar culture (see Frigyesi, 1998). This experience set the tone for Bartók’s re-invention of the Hungarian musical idiom based on its folk culture.
One important component of standardized nationalism was the identification of Hungarian music with the gypsy sound, exemplified by the csárdás. This artificially conceived space was cut off from the uninhibited modulations of the lived ‘sonic culture’. As early as 1906, Bartók points to this state of affairs as an inexplicable deafness of his compatriots: The greater part of present-day Hungarian society is not Hungarian enough, nor naive enough and, on the other hand, not well-educated enough for these songs to find their way into the heart of these people. Hungarian folk songs in the concert halls! Sounds rather preposterous today. (as quoted in Suchoff, 2001: 52–3)
In fact, what in Hungary and abroad was traditionally considered the logical key to the Magyar acoustic tradition, the ‘gypsy melody’, was neither Hungarian nor gypsy, strictly speaking. ‘The mixture of such heterogeneous elements does not produce a Hungarian style, merely a conglomerate lacking any style’ (1976: 301), says Bartók. This generic style, also used by Liszt and Brahms, is music ‘unimaginably marred almost past recognition by [the gentry’s] oriental fantasy’ (1976: 301). Instead, Bartók is aiming for: a certain indescribable, unexplainable spirit – a certain je ne sais pas quoi – which will give to anyone who listens, and who knows the rural backgrounds, the feeling: ‘This could not have been written by any but an Eastern European musician.’ (1976: 396)
Such inventive spirit found expression in Bartók’s famous ethnomusicology. Its premise was the living synthesis between East and West and, through it, a redefinition of the region of Central Europe as not simply an offshoot of Europe but a ‘mooring zone’ which, like Bartók’s sound, promotes a psychological unity between the ponderously universal and the quietly intimate.
Between 1905 and 1918, Bartók together with his friend and collaborator Zoltán Kodály travelled the countryside from ‘Hungary proper’ to what today are Slovakia, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Romania, recording thousands of folk melodies, which had previously been confined to the anonymity of the local peasant life. 3 Their efforts discovered and exposed the roots of an ancient acoustic culture, with murky ‘Oriental’ origins, based on the five tone (pentatonic) scale. As Bartók admitted himself, the net effect of this activity proved to be of decisive influence on his work ‘because it freed [him] from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys’ (1976: 410).
Unlike the individualist art-music, which carves out a ferociously guarded artistic territory, folk music ‘is a social act and not an individual one’ (1976: 173, my emphasis). This is the case especially when we consider that the peasant melody, in the act of its singular reproduction, is fairly unstable and elastic, showing divergent shapes based on impromptu, momentary improvisations (1976: 82). Bartók ascribes to it a type of natural perfection similar to Janáček’s search for the ‘primary organics’ of phenomena and the universal spirit encoded in folk melodies: The pure folk music can be considered as a natural phenomenon influencing higher art music, as bodily properties perceptible with the eye are for the fine arts, or the phenomena of life are for the poet. This influence is most effective for the musician if he acquaints himself with folk music in the form in which it lives, in unbridled strength … and not by means of inanimate collections of folk music. … If he surrenders himself to the impact of this living folk music and to all the circumstances which are the conditions of life, and if he reflects in his works the effects of these impressions, then we might say of him that he has portrayed therein a part of life. (1976: 318)
At its core, folk music is imbued with dynamic elasticity which has the power to re-formulate and absorb the multitude of foreign elements in its path into elaborate and finely grained textures. Its acoustic history is a trail of continuous ‘crossings’ and ‘re-crossings’ of aural/melodic forms. Folk melody is the archetype of the strength of ‘racial impurity’, as Bartók says further (1976: 31). He finds an example of such cultural impurity, to describe it in more familiar terms, close to home, exposing a layered reality where a Hungarian melody was taken over in the past by a Slovakian one, and thus ‘slovakized’, but whose hybrid form is then again re-claimed and ‘re-magyarized’, making it different from the original even though, crucially, still no less authentically Hungarian. Bartók quotes the famous Rákóczi March as an example of this cross-implantation which, after a type of Bohemian experience (melodically speaking), given that it contains elements of Arabic-Persian, Eastern and ‘Central European’ origin, is still in all this heterogeneity ‘a masterpiece of music whose spirit and characteristics are incontestably Hungarian’ (1976: 32, my emphasis). This is more than just an indication of how Bartók transcended the merely provincial experience of identity without at the same time erasing the intimacy of the local microcosm. On a more extended level, it is the formula through which he attempted to capture the material reality with which the landscape was saturated – the empirical density of its centre composed of a multitude of cultural idiosyncrasies, brought together into one, periodically re-fitted sonority.
Bartók practised something like a morphological sociology of sound based on precise, ethnographic description of how music lives culturally, in the richness and complexity of its own identity. He uncovered the ‘extra-territorial’ acoustic element, tracing how it shoots through and around the political territory which is supposed to finally and unequivocally stabilize it. As such, his method of sound collection inadvertently amplified a cultural aesthetics caught in the rhythm of showing and receding – ‘a mechanism consisting in harmonizing optimally the passage of one form into another, up to the now instantaneous threshold of their disappearance’ (Virilio, 1991: 71).
If Janáček envisioned a type of Lebensphilosophie which condensed the minutiae of material life into the organic wholeness of sound, Bartók’s approach was much more aesthetically deliberate: he attempted to fuse the universal and the particular into a space where ‘everything is variation and potentiality … [and where] no musical statement functions as theme in the sense that it would be the most perfect formulation of the central idea’ (Frigyesi, 1998: 292–3). Nonetheless, both notions of identity, as living synthesis in Bartók and extended cultural vitality in Janáček (orientations which overlap to a significant extent), express the universal spirit and the idea of Europe, which Simmel described at the end of the war in 1918 as: This ideal ‘Europe’ … a place of spiritual values which the contemporary man of culture honours and accomplishes when his national constitution [wesen], this inalienable [unverlierbarer] possession, nevertheless does not become a blinding enclosure. (2008 [1918]: 1148, my translation)
Bartók’s inadvertent attack on what, in the eyes of many, was the bedrock of Hungarian nationalism did not go unnoticed. His efforts to discover the kernel of Hungarian sound in the peasant music at home and beyond created hybrid compositions with Romanian, Slovakian and even Arabic materials mixed in, which Bartók nonetheless presented as ‘national’ art-music. Is it any wonder that the traditional nationalists were threatened by this kind of search for a divergent cultural reality unfolding in all its qualitative vibrancy, right in front of their eyes? Eventually, this even led to some amusing statements describing Bartók as a Romanian or a Slovakian composer, to which he responded unambiguously: I consider myself a Hungarian composer. … My creative work, just because it arises from 3 sources (Hungarian, Romanian, Slovakian), might be regarded as the embodiment of the very concept of integration so much emphasized in Hungary today. … My own idea, however – of which I have been fully conscious since I found myself a composer – is the brotherhood of peoples. … I try – to the best of my ability – to serve this idea in my music, therefore I don’t reject any influence, be it Slovakian, Romanian, Arabic or from any other source. … For character and milieu must somehow harmonize with each other. (quoted in Suchoff, 2001: 115–16)
Caught in the Mêlée
One thing that should have emerged from our discussion by now is that territories must centralize, that they are implicated in the process of chasing down the centre as a point on the map. This might be a very obvious assertion, but it seems that it cannot be repeated often enough, given that the geographical centre of Europe is disputed to this day.
Technically speaking, there is no mathematical centre for an irregular surface. This is especially true of a continent whose borders historically fluctuated, and have always been disputed and fluid (Delanty, 1995). Not only has the notion of Europe as a large Asian peninsula not completely disappeared, but whenever we try to pinpoint and identify centres in geographical terms, we inadvertently run into problems.
Let us reflect for a moment. Where would we find the geographical centre of Europe today? Certainly not in Brussels or Strasbourg, unless we revert back to some type of amputated physiognomy of the continent, without its ‘East’ – the same East which in the European imaginary has always been the point of contact with the Orient. A quick review of Europe’s historical definitions dispels any notion of a clear-cut consensus. Historically, it all depended on who measured what, according to which limits and criteria. The effect is that one can find references to the geographical centre of Europe in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany and most recently, since 1989, in Lithuania. The place is located 26 km north of Vilnius. There is a National Park and a monument to commemorate that newly found point, curiously enough, by French geographers. Of course, it is also being disputed.
Attempting to find a geographic point of contact with lived reality is to reduce the latter to a dimensionless, arid topology that does not touch the essential. All such points behave in the manner of a collapsed lung – they deflate the volume of the entire landscape.
Perhaps we can further approach this entire contraption of centres and identities more effectively by describing them as interior to a particular geography. In this case, the interior is not something that separates off – a type of cultural cul-de-sac with clearly drawn limits. Rather, it is a space of intimacy, not infrequently of frantic and unpredictable action. Its potential is this unique positioning as ‘the not-external outside and the not-internal inside’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 60). Anything else reduces identity to ‘a dimensionless point on a diagram of sovereignty’ (Nancy, 2000: 145). In this sense, what has historically been referred to as Central Europe is only a zone of condensed intimacy, one interior condition of European identity, but not its centre per se. We would then be speaking of identity as a mêlée (Nancy, 2000).
In a short essay entitled ‘The Eulogy for the Mêlée (For Sarajevo, March 1993)’, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) argues against such spatial reduction of presence. The text is a singular act of mourning, which does not simply eulogize the type of plurality of being we have heard Danilo Kiš personify (Kiš died in 1989, just before he could have witnessed the enactment of that other side of identity) but attempts to theoretically ‘unwork’ its passing. By losing itself in the muteness of a point as clearly demarcated repudiation – Serb, Bosnian, Muslim, Christian, etc. – Sarajevo became dissociated from its landscape (Nancy, 2000: 145). The mêlée as mixing, conjuring, gathering, evaporating, circulating, crossing, knotting, exchanging, etc., in other words the whirlwind of cultural interpenetration and encounter, has been flushed out in the name of a pure substance, the hermetically sealed and naked identity. Its schematics of purification enact the mannerism of being affixed to a point – to one’s own centrality. But ‘it is the “mêlée” which defines the style or tone of a culture’, in its divergent amplitudes: ‘There is such a thing [for instance] as a French culture, but it itself has various voices’ (Nancy, 2000: 153). The resonance of transitory identities, which are always caught in the midst of cultural life, is only traceable through the topography of landscapes, not the topology of territories.
Topography (from topos ‘place’ and graphein ‘to write’) is a textural description of space. It is an active way of making places emerge in their profile, which pays attention to local detail, to breaks, discontinuities and raptures. Bartók and Janáček practised this type of engagement with space almost exclusively. Topology, on the other hand, is the science of the logical continuity of space. In mathematics, where the term originates, it means a precise calculation of surfaces, their continuity and deformation, but never tearing or gluing together.
Landscapes are complex structures, which combine various topographies into an interactive network, but not a ‘reactive fusion’, in the manner of territories. The latter are a topological system expressed in the politics of frontiers and their continuity (both historical and geographical), thus always arranging and rearranging blocks of unbreakable space as units of measurement applied to reality. The topography of landscapes expresses cultural spontaneity and creativity. The topology of territories sets the procedures of political standardization and operational predictability into motion. Of course, we know well enough that neither exists in its pure extension. By pressing on reality from both ends, landscapes and territories create variably compressed and pressurized middle zones.
We are thus speaking of landscapes as forms where ‘we feel the vitality of those opposing tendencies [of stability and movement], and – instinctively sensing these antitheses in ourselves’ (Simmel, 1965 [1911]: 261). Most of the time, given the non-expugnable, critical mass of politics which flattens the nuance of cultural space, this form is active in its reduced stature as ‘extra-territoriality’. But when engaged, this is enough to give us the sense of being within a territory yet also withdrawn from it. This act of cultural perception discovers an ‘inoperative community’ (Nancy, 1991) of the middle which, not landlocked by borders, is experienced as a type of spatial extraction. Instead of space as political technology, one is faced with ‘an atopical topology’ (Nancy, 1991: 20) of invention. This is why ‘the circumscription of a community, or better areality (its nature as area, as formed space), is not a territory, but the areality of an ecstasy’ (Nancy, 1991: 20), of standing on the outer edge (ek-stasis).
Conclusion
‘Musical reality is always somewhere else’, says Vladimir Jankélévitch, dispensing a type of ‘spiritual geography’ onto sound (2003: 103). Its endemically understated location ‘perpetually blurs and clouds over the pinpointing of place … [making] all localization fugitive, fleeting’ (2003: 103). Only this kind of partially erased geography is able to circumnavigate the ideological encampments of culture.
The advantage of sound as a historical and cultural artefact, given that music is the most temporal of all the arts, lies in its ability to trace and re-trace a lived moment, without necessarily falling into the paralysis of signification, since music in itself does not have to mean anything. Thus, the vitality of cultural resonance is fuelled by the mêlée of primary contact with reality – a condition which brings us a step closer to the elastic space of mundane events and their navigational hesitation. The recovery and analytical cultivation of this kind of stance is the only way that an active topography, which outmanoeuvres standardized reality, can emerge from inside geo-metric forms. For, given that resonance is ‘neither a substantial reality nor a mental reality … it cannot be resolved into abstractions’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 402). In other words, it exists ‘neither in a collection of things in space nor in an aggregate of occupied places … [and therefore] has an actuality other than that of the abstract signs and real things’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 402). In this sense, we are conceptually approaching something like culture’s own, generic hermeneutics, etched into its texture precisely as a kind of resonance, or a medium through which the exemplarity of its own logic is transmitted. Such a ‘native’ paradigm of the immediate and the ordinary reality ‘is defined by a third and paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular’ (Agamben, 2009: 27, my emphasis). And this, in turn, means that each subsequent scenario as a self-contained moment is exposed through the friction of contrasting tension, like notes in a musical composition, amplifying the quietly shared space, before that space outgrows and subsequently distorts the finely calibrated cultural intimacy. As we have seen, this is precisely how Bartók and Janáček worked with and worked over the many singular strands of sonic landscapes, which were then collected into aggregate pools of still uniquely individual acoustic realities.
Of course, sound can also be hijacked and ideologically rescaled. Adorno knows this better than anyone else, ending the footnote on the ‘extra-territorial’ art of Central Europe in the following manner: ‘Ideological blood-and-soil music … is always affirmative and allied with the tradition, whereas it is precisely the tradition of all official music that is suspended by Janáček’s diction, modelled on his language’ (2006: 176). Adorno writes this in the context of discussing Western art music, especially elevating Arnold Schoenberg’s sound to the status of the leading phenomenon that has the power to break through the culture industry of perception, although he also mistrusts the most advanced plateau of Schoenberg’s artistic development – the 12-tone method of composition. Be that as it may, Adorno’s dogged persistence in recuperating perception from the intrusion of a territorial politics of ready-made relationships is the type of awareness which has been consistently eroded, not only from the plateau of culture but also from the intellectual space of our analytical sensibilities. Hence, one should never be overwhelmed by the pull of territories and the tainted voice of traditions, in whatever form, given that these are already politically deployed spaces. The cultural sociologist must look for landscapes within all the territories. This involves finding an outlet, a topographical vent, through which the standard definitions of cultural presence in a defined space escape.
But what of Central Europe and its tortured geographies? Yes, indeed, it is a contradictory space with plural valences, where the perceived, conceived and lived textures (Lefebvre, 1991) come together. Except that it is also more than a simple plurality, given its paradoxical mutuality of voices which speak simultaneously, together, though they are not necessarily speaking to one another. This is how one is not simply placed in, but resides along the edges of all the asymmetries: We who live here … right between East and West – we too have something to say. We try to soothe the quarrel, we try to put the bellicose extremes in proper perspective, we play the paradoxical middle; in our own persons we live out the irreconcilable. (Konrád, 1984: 113)
In this sense, Central Europe is not and has never been a self-contained geographical figure. Rather, it has always been a composition loosely based on the logic of centrality; a type of geo-graphic notation ‘which transports the body outside of itself in a paradoxical kind of alienation’ (Lefebvre, 1991: 309).