Rhythm and Existence

RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 brill.com/rp Rhythm and Existence Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Södertörn University [email protected] Abstract The present article proposes a reflection on the relation between music and language setting out from the experience of listening to words and listening to music. It relies to a certain extent upon an existential-phenomenological approach and develops the distinction between the sounding of sounds (sounding words) and the sound of sounding (musical sounds). From this distinction, a redefinition of rhythm is suggested based on the experience of listening and on the close listening of some pieces of music. Keywords rhythm – listening – music – sounding Philosophical thoughts about music can be pronounced and heard. We can listen to words about musical listening, to sounding words about musical sounding. It would be marvelous to have the musical pieces mentioned in a sounding lecture about music performed and sounding live, above all because this would open up what could be called the “phenomenological situation” for our question. The “phenomenological situation” is the one of departing from two kinds of listening, two kinds of sounding –musical sounds and listening, on the one hand, and speech sounds and listening, on the other. These two kinds of sound and listening—music and speech—present the basic difficulty of developing a phenomenology of music, the difficulty of saying in words what can never be © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV , LEIDEN , 2018 | DOI 10.1163/15691640-12341399 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 319 said, still less in words.1 And nevertheless both words and music sound; and we listen to both words and music. The difficulty here is the one of dealing with a coincidence that never coincides or a non-coincidence that always coincides—music and language. Or to put it more simply: the difficulty lies in the immediate experience that music is and is not language and therefore that the relation between music and language builds a paradox rather than an opposition. Maybe we could say that they build a rhythm. We all experience, in a pre-reflexive and pre-musical manner, the paradoxical difference between music and language. We can experience how different languages are musical, identifying and even comparing melodious and rhythmical elements in them. Every language has melody and rhythm, which becomes even more explicit when we speak a language with accents, bringing to the foreign language the musicality of the own language. Listening to how non-natives pronounce the language of natives, one experiences how non-consonant one’s own consonance may sound. However, at the same time and even though we experience of the musicality of our own language and of foreign languages, we always manage to differentiate music from words, a song from the musicality of spoken words, from a speech. The experience of sounding words in music and in speech appears commonly as very distinct. If I begin to speak Italian here and say: se il languidi miei sguardi, se il sospir’ interrotti, without knowing a word of Italian we would be able to hear immediately the musicality of the Italian language; we could even hear the poetic value of these words and identify them as verses of a poem by Claudio Achillini (1574–1640) that we may not know: se il languidi miei sguardi, se il sospir’ interroti, se le tronche parole non han sin hor potuto2. But what happens 1 2 Schönberg, A. “Es gibt relativ wenig Menschen, die imstande sind, rein musikalisch zu verstehen, was Musik zu sagen ist,” in Stil und Gedanke, (Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1989), 51. Lettera Amorosa by Claudio Achillini (1574–1640) Se i languidi miei sguardi, Se i sospir’ interrotti, Se le tronche parolle non han sin hor potuto, O bel idolo mio, farvi de le mie fiamm’intera fede: Leggete queste note, credete a questa carta, A questa carta in cui sotto forma d’inchiostro il cor stillai. Qui sotto scorgerete quell’ interni pensieri Che con passi d’amore scorron l’anima mia. Anzi avampar vedrete Com’ in sua propria sfera nelle vostre bellezze Il foco mio. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 320 SCHUBACK Non è già part’in voi che con forza invisibile d’Amore tutt’a se non mi tragga. Altro già non son io che di vostra beltà preda e troffeo. A voi mi volgo o chiome, cari miei laci d’oro. Deh, come mai potea scampar sicuro, Se come lacci l’anima legaste, Com’oro la compraste? Voi, pur voi, dunque sete de la mia libertà Catena e prezzo. Stami miei pretiosi bionde fila divine, Con voi l’eterna parca sovra’l fuso fatal mia vita torce. Voi, voi, capelli d’oro, voi pur sete di lei, Che è tutta foco mio, raggi e faville. Ma se faville sete, on d’avien ch’ad ogn’ Hora contro l’uso del foco in giù scendete? Ah, ch’a voi per salir scender conviene, Ch’a la maggior celeste ove aspirate, O sfera degl’ardori, o Paradiso, È post’in quel bel viso. Cara mia selva d’oro, richissimi capelli, In voi quel labrinto Amor intesse, Ond’ uscir non saprà l’anima mia. Tronchi pur mort’i rami del pretioso bosco, E de la fragil carne scuota pur lo mio spirto: Che tra fronde si belle anco recise rimarrò prigionero, Fatto gelida polve e d’ombra ignudo. Dolcissimi legami, belle mie pioggie d’oro, Qual hor sciolte cadete da quelle ricche nubi, Onde racolte sete, e cadendo formate Pretiose procelle, onde con onde d’or Bagnando andate scogli di latte e rivi d’alabastro, More subitamente, O miracol’ eterno d’amoroso desio, Fra si belle tempest’ arso il cor mio. Ma già l’hora m’invita, o degli affetti miei Nuntia fedele, cara carta amorosa, Che dalla penna ti dividi omai. Vanne, e s’Amor e’l Cielo cor tese ti Concede che da begl’occhi non t’accenda il raggio, Ricovra entro il bel seno. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 321 when we listen to Monteverdi’s musical piece based on these words, in one of the most recitative musical pieces in the repertoire of classical vocal music, that is, a musical piece that is the closest to spoken language as possible? We listen to it as music, rather than as a poem or as spoken words. Even without musical training, we are able not only to listen to the musical sound through the words and to distinguish it from the poetry of the words and from the sound of spoken words, but we can even perceive the unity of these three dimensions. We listen to the difference of the musical sound insofar as we listen to it as something detached from the sound of the words. It is easy to perceive that “the musical sound” is neither opposed to the sound of the words nor identified with it; it is neither dependent nor independent of the sound of the words. It is something in tension with the sound of the words. The musical sound appears in this piece in tension with the sounds of the words, as another sounding in tension with the habitual sounding of language. Here, we have to do with tensionality rather than with intentionality. But how is it possible to distinguish the musical sound from the sound of the words? We could say that in these verses of Monteverdi the words of language are transformed into a melody, that is, into an ordered coherence between successive tones, where the musical structure or order becomes more pregnant than the linguistic order of the words in a phrase. In German one would say that in a song words are vertont. The same words shift from being spoken to being sung, obeying an order other than the linguistic one. If we consider that the linguistic order is an order of meanings, we could say that the musical order is beyond the order of meanings or even that it exposes another meaning of meaning. Listening to the closeness between language and music, as in the piece of Monteverdi, we also listen to their irrevocable distance—thus we listen to the tension between a sounding beyond meanings and a sounding that enacts meanings. This tension is not a suppression of sounding meanings but a “suspension” that interrupts it and keeps it apart so that another sounding may sound. In this suspension, it becomes possible to listen to the sound of sounding and not only to the sounding meaning of sounds. In this pre-reflexive and even pre-musical way of describing the paradoxical relation between music and language, music appears as music that detaches from language by means of a suspension of the meanings and by sustaining the sound of sounding. It shows that a certain loss of habits of listening has to take place for the sake of listening to the sound of sounding. Suspension of Chi sa che tu non gionga da si felice loco Per sentieri di neve a un cor di foco! RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 322 SCHUBACK meaning is an interruption of habits of listening, revealing that musical listening has to break through within listening when musical sound breaks through as the sound of sounding in tension with the sounding of sounds. What appears here is the tension between musical sound and the sound of language as the one between the sound of sounding and the sounding of sounds. Listening to how a syllable or a simple vocal is sustained in a medieval sequence, such as in the sequences composed by Hildergard of Bingen, we can experience how the sounding of the sound suspends the meanings of a sound. Here, the sustaining of a single sound or syllable of a meaning word suspends the meaning, letting the sounding sound. Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), in a certain sense the first phenomenologist of music, considered that the long duration of a sustained pitch should be considered the first step into song3. To sustain a pitch during a long period of time can be considered a description of the “suspension” of meaning through which the musical element appears in the word, showing how the musical element coincides with the word without being the word. At this moment, the sounding vocal or syllable becomes instrumental, we could say, and the voice is heard as any other instrument. Here the difference between vocal and instrumental music disappears and thus what sounds is the sound of sounding and not the sounding of sounds. The distinction between sound of sounding and sounding of sounds aims to seize what is proper to a musical sound within a world of sounds. Thus if music can be considered the “art of sounds” it is the art of sounds within a world of sounds, within the sounds of the world. Even if one could say with John Cage that music is “the art of silences,” it is because in music and perhaps only in music it becomes possible to listen to the sound of silence in the silence of sounds. If music is made with musical instruments or with things of the world, the distinction between music and non-music does not have to do with the “kinds” of sounds and “silences” that are aesthetically ordered but with the interruption of the sounding of sounds so that the sound of sounding, both in silence and in sound, may sound. This can be understood in the sense that musical sound makes audible the way a sound is a sound, the how of the sound. In its way of being sound, sound is nothing. We may recall here the verses of T. S. Eliot in the Waste Land4 asking: 3 4 Carl Stumpf. Die Anfänge der Musik (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1911), 25. T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land and other Poems. (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 31. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 323 “What is that noise?” The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” Nothing again nothing. “Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?” The Waste Land is a poem about the nothingness of the sound, a poem from how the sound sounds. Pierre Henri’s Variation pour un porte et un soupir could be mentioned as a musical example that demands special ears for listening to the sound of sounding.5 The sound sounds. This etymological figure indicates the tautological character of the way the sound is a sound. It says that the sound is its sounding and nothing else. It says that the sound is itself; neither a reference to something other than itself, reflection, but even less a reference to itself, self-reflection. What lacks in sound is a “self.” A way to understand this could be to compare the myth of Narcissus with the myth of Echo. Echo shows how sound is itself, that is, how sound is sounding. It is neither in itself nor outside itself, thus the sounding is at once and at the same time an inside outside and an outside inside. The sound is ek-static and ex-centric. Heidegger’s paragraphs about the ek-static temporality of Dasein in Being and Time, are one of the most clear descriptions of the ecstatic and excentric temporal structure of the sounding. Being in itself outside and beyond itself, the sounding always is in itself always and already listening; it is in itself always and already silence. It is vibration; neither reflection nor self-reflection, insofar as it is sounding and not something that sounds. The expression “the sound sounds” (alluding to Heidegger’s “the world worlds,” [die Welt weltet] and to Nietzsche’s “the flash-lightening lightens,” [der Blitz blitzt]) aims to point towards the way the sound is sounding, to the manner of the sounding sounds. The sounding sounds as the enigma of one in itself differentiated, of one being itself many others and, this in such a moving way, that in music being is nothing but becoming. It is not the becoming of something but a becoming in “dissolution,” absenting presence and presenting absence. Indeed the enigma of the sounding is already the enigma of a single musical note, the enigma of one sound being itself a series of sounds. In a certain sense, we could say that music is the longing for finding one sound capable of making audible the sounding that it is. “Music is the longing for music,” to quote a phrase of the Swedish composer Peter Schuback. 5 Pierre Henri. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dud4D6PeHqQ. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 324 SCHUBACK Among innumerable pieces of music to which we might listen for the sake of discussing the relationship between phenomenology and music, I propose the Eight Piano pieces op. 3, written by the Hungarian composer György Kurtág, first performed in 1960 in Darmstadt by the pianist Andor Losonczy. 6 These pieces can be described as explorations of ways to pursue this longing for finding sound capable to make audible the sounding that musical sound is. They share this longing with every musical piece, we could of course say, but they do it in a very special way. They are pieces that aim to connect the smallest musical elements possible. They are explorations of what can be called musical fragments, an exploration that summarizes to a certain extent Kurtág’s work as a whole. His Kafka’s Fragments for violin and voice are another good example of this. A fragment is, as we know, a broken piece, a part detached from a whole that discovers a complete existence in its uncompletedness. It is a fragment insofar as it fragments the whole, both the whole taken as spatial totality and as continuity in time, building interrupted spaces and times. In this sense, the pieces could be rather called explorations of musical “fragmentations.” In addition, Kurtág has in this respect been very influenced by his countryman Béla Bartók and also by Schönberg and above all by Anton Webern. Webern is generally regarded as the clearest example of musical fragmentation even if he himself did not like to use this term or to describe his work in this sense. (Schönberg preferred to describe fragmentation in terms of “liquidation”). The term “fragment” is to be taken here as an interruption that shows another meaning of wholeness, wholeness as fugacity, as “becoming in dissolution,” Werden im Vergehen, to use here a title by Hölderlin. In this “aesthetic of fragmentation,” we listen to the longing for reducing musical ideas to its minimal elements, that is, the longing for complete incompleteness, the longing for fragments, for becoming entire in its own finitude. In the first of these eight pieces, we can hear how the play between the ostinato in the bass and the chromatic pulsing of the other notes reduce various musical elements, both the ones perceived successively and those perceived simultaneously—both what sounds extensively and what sounds intensively—into a complex vibration that seems to push all elements back to the smallest of all musical elements, namely, the single note. What we hear is not one note but the hammering of fragments of notes, almost the same notes, thus they sound in slight chromatic variations, building vibrations and pulsations. As we know, the pitch of a note is directly related to the rate of 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSfbD3izkdE. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 325 vibrations. It is this rate that enables us to listen to sounds or disables us from doing so when the rate is too low, as in infra-sounds, or too high, as in ultrasounds. One single note is a multiplicity of vibrations perceived as unity. Musical listening, or the musical ear differs from non-musical listening insofar as the musical listening is capable of listening to the various sounds within the single sound, to various vibrations within the single note. Musical listening must reduce listening in order to begin to listen to the sound of sounding. This is what Pierre Schaeffer developed following some phenomenological thoughts under his ideas of reduced listening, “écoute réduite” and his concept of the acousmatic.7 The pieces of Kurtág, discussed here, force the listening toward the same, but in inverse direction: they force us to listen to the various vibrations as a single note. The fragmentation of musical elements and structures into the smallest and most elementary sounding parts demands a listening that instead of decomposing the sounds within the sound composes the multiplicity of sounds into one single note. From whatever direction we may listen, from the one to the various and from the various to the one, we experience musical listening as the attentive apprehension of the one in itself differentiated, the mystery of a sound. The discovery of the “one in itself differentiated”, hen diapheron heautōi, as Plato expresses in the Symposium, attributing the expression to Heraclitus, was experienced since Antiquity as the very definition of beauty, something that Hölderlin described very profoundly in his Hyperion. Musical sound was considered in Antiquity as the source of all beauty insofar as it is the most immediate and clear revelation of the one in itself differentiated, the unity of the manifold. And because this unity reveals an ordered coherence of the manifold that touches the soul of the body in the way that only beauty can do, it is conceived of not merely as order but as aesthetical order, an order that moves and touches, a transformative sensible order, a order that demands, indeed, the “dérèglement de tous les sens,” “derangement of all the senses” upon which Rimbaud insisted.8 The Greeks called rhythm this aesthetically ordered coherence of the manifold, the one in itself differentiated that deranges the senses. Taken in this ancient Greek meaning, a single note, the unity of multiple vibrations is rhythm. The first of these pieces by Kurtág explores the fragmentation of various musical elements into the minimal element of a single note, that is, into rhythm. In this sense, it could be considered a fragmentation of music into rhythm, a fragmentation that suspends and puts in brackets, that is, reduces 7 8 Pierre Schaeffer. Traité des Objects Musicaux (Paris: ed. Seuil, 1966). Arthur Rimbaud. Lettre à Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871, in Poésies. (Paris: Librairie Générale Francaise, 1984), 200. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 326 SCHUBACK music to rhythm, to the vibration of a multiplicity of sounds perceived as unity. What happens here is a musical reduction in which the meaning of rhythm is transformed. Thus as single note, a rhythm has to be disassociated from the idea of measure. For a great number of listeners, contemporary music sounds awful and hard to listen to because it presents a suspension or even dissolution of musical elements, such as melody, harmony and rhythm, that is, a suspension or dissolution of music itself. In response to this kind of criticism, Karlheinz Stockhausen said once that the difficulty is not that contemporary music does not have, for instance, rhythm but that it only has rhythm, lacking instead measure, metrum. Stockhausen also remarked that this complaint is the same as the one about the predominance of “noises,” of “non-periodic swinging” instead of periodic, called sounds9. In these contemporary destructions, suspensions, and dissolutions of traditional musical parameters, contemporary music accomplishes a series of reductions—that is, of suspensions of the immediate and clear identification of rhythm with measure, of melody with succession in time, of harmony with tonality. Kurtág’s pieces reveal sound as rhythm, making audible the way in which rhythm does not coincide with measure and metrum10. Rhythm is vibrating resonance and not measure. This is made clearly audible in the way Kurtág uses, for instance, the musical comma, respiration as the un-measurable and un-measuring element that demands an unlearning of measure counting. The old definition of rhythm as regularity, periodicity, symmetry, and harmony of movements, that is, of an aesthetical order of continuity, is suspended in these pieces, thus what we hear are intense and vibrating interruptions, caesuras of flows, exposing rhythm as the tension between continuity and discontinuity, indeed as discontinuous continuity and continuous discontinuity. Here, rhythm is heard as vibrating fragments. Since Ancient Greece, we have been used to understand rhythm as a flow of movement, and thereby as a measure of regularity, periodicity, symmetry, harmony, and continuity. For a long time, the Greek word ρυθμός was considered to be derived from ρέω, ρέι, from flow. Besides this meaning related to the continuity of nature and life, the Ancients also knew a sense of rhythm 9 10 Karlheinz Stockhausen. “Die Einheit der musikalischen Zeit” (1962), "The Concept of Unity in Electronic Music”, translated by Elaine Barkin. Perspectives of New Music 1, no. 1 (Autumn): 39–48. We can even “see” this difference between vibration and measure if we would play the first piece, for instance, when showing the first modernist film made in Brazil 1931, by Mario Peixoto, called Limites, (Limits), a film originally without sound. The fitting together of Kurtág’s piece with the film cannot be explained by measured, only by the vibrating and pulsing meeting between the movements of light and sound. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 327 as form and shape, that is, as structure and ordered coherence, and thereby as what defines the essence of things. Emile Benveniste’s famous article on rhythm aimed to show how rhythm means form, rather than flow11. Discussing what absence of rhythm could be, Aristotle says that it is nature. Nature is τὸ πρῶτον ἀρρύθμιστον, primordial shapelessness and formlessness, inarticulate elementarity12. Already from the first document of the Greek use of the word ρυθμός by the lyric poet Archilochus (frag. 67a)13, rhythm is conceived of as what keeps the human in its humanity, by finding a measure of happiness in the constant change of happiness and unhappiness. Rhythm defines the human as “aesthetical” being, so to speak, as a being that feels the feeling ordering it from out a comprehension of the whole. It is also in this sense that Plato considered that only humans experience rhythm14. Following ancient theories of rhythm, we discover a powerful contradiction in the understanding of rhythm. Thus rhythm is conceived of both as the flow of continuity of nature and life, alternating life and death, and as measure of beauty, as ordered coherence that keeps the human in its unique site on earth. Rhythm is conceived of both as what defines the life of life and therefore also the life of man and as what defines the life of man in contrast to the life of life. Besides these two contradictory significations, rhythm also received a tragic meaning, the tragic meaning of a caesura, something that Hölderlin clearly showed in his Observations on Oedipus and Antigone15. As caesura, rhythm means breathing, comma, and thereby interruption of a flow in the flow, fragmentation of the whole in the whole. In its tragic meaning, rhythm is neither the measure of continuity nor discontinuity in a measure, but continuous discontinuity and discontinuous continuity. In this tragic sense, rhythm is the way human life is in the whole of life not being the whole of life. It is the way human life is itself a discontinuity in the continuity of life and nature, showing the discontinuous way life and nature are continuously life and nature. The tragic meaning of rhythm as caesura, comma, and interruption seizes the distinction between man and nature as rhythmical and 11 12 13 14 15 Emile Benveniste. “La notion de “rythme” dans son expression linguistique” in Problèmes de linguistique générale, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 327–335. Aristotle. Physics, II, 1, 193ª 10–14. Archilocus, frag 67a Diels-Kranz, … χαρτοῖσίν τε χαῖρε καὶ κακοῖσιν ἀσχάλα μὴ λίην· γίνωσκε δ᾽ οἷος ῥυσμὸς ἀνθρώπους ἔχει. Biblioteca Augustana. http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante07/Archilochos/arc_tetr.html. Plato. Nomoi B, Legg 653 e. Hölderlin, F. ”Anmerkungen zum Oedipus und zur Antigone” in Sämtliche Werke, vol V, Stuttgarter Hölderlin-Ausgabe, (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag/J. G. Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1952). RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 328 SCHUBACK not as contradictory or dialectical, thus it assumes human existence as “cosmic fragment” recalling an expression of Eugen Fink’s, as a discontinuity in the continuity of nature and life, showing the paradoxical experience that the difference between man and nature is the way man is nature. In an essay entitled “The Original Structure of the Work of Art,”16 Giorgio Agamben, interpreting some words of Hölderlin, presents a theory of rhythm that can be read as an interpretation of this tragic meaning of rhythm as caesura. Even if he does not relate to tragedy and neither to Hölderlin’s discussions on the tragic caesura,17 he seizes the tragic meaning of rhythm as the double movement of a holding back and gives a new meaning, as the double movement of “reserve” and “gift.”18 In this essay, Agambem redefines the meaning of the phenomenological epoché, by showing how epoché is nothing but rhythm: “reserve” and “gift.” He proposes an understanding of phenomenological epoché, of rhythm as the “original structure of the work of art”, a holding back of time and space, of life itself that shows and gives to human life “the original place of his world,” “the original site of man,” “the original measure of man on earth.” We can complement Agamben’s interpretation and say that, interrupting measures of time and space, the work of art shows how human life is itself an interruption of life and nature, a discontinuity in continuity, and in this sense a rhythmical way of being and non-being life and nature. Reading, in this way, Agamben’s redefinition of the phenomenological epoché as rhythm, and rhythm as the original structure of the work of art, we could say that in its tragic meaning rhythm shows the unique way human life is life and nature not being life and nature. Rhythm would then mean a tragic way of experiencing differences and oppositions beyond the dialectics of contradictions, neither as synthesis nor as the ordered coherence of parts. From the experience of the work of art as what interrupts time and space, holding man back to its site of “cosmic fragment,” we could say that the difference between human life and the life of life is rhythm. The rhythmical differentiation both exceeds and withdraws measure, exposing the instant in which succession in time and juxtaposition in space are suspended so that oppositions between interiority and exteriority, before and after, here and there, sounding and listening, past and future, time and space are suspended. Here one is, in relation to the other, a non-other, and the 16 17 18 Agamben, Giorgio. “The Original Strcture of the Work of Art” in The Man Without Content, (California: Stanford University Press, 1999). About Hölderlin and the tragic caesura, see Lacoue-Labarthe, “La cesure du speculative” in L’imitation des modernes. (Paris: Galilée, 1986) Ibid., 100. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 RHYTHM AND EXISTENCE 329 difference between one another is their identity. This rhythmical nondifferentiated differentiation and differentiated non-differentiation defines the way the sounding sounds. Rhythm is how the sound of sounding sounds, vibrating fragments and caesuras resounding as the heart of man. The emancipation of rhythm from measure and metrum that necessarily followed what Schönberg called “the emancipation of dissonance”19 from a tonal center, means the emancipation of the sound of sounding from the sounding of sounds. When rhythm is heard as resonance and not as measure, when dissonance is heard as reverberation and not as succession of tones in unordered incoherence, musical sound breaks through as “the unity of a musical space,” to use Schönbergs expression, an unity that is “two- or moredimensional.” Schönberg defined “the unity of a musical space” comparing it to the description of Swedenborg’s “heaven” made by Balzac in his Seraphita: “a space without under or above, without right or left, back or front, where every musical configuration, every movement of tunes and pitches is to be heard as reciprocal relation of tunes and pitches, of oscillating swings, that emerge in different times and places.”20 The unity of this musical space demands, insists Schönberg, an “absolute and unitary perception,” something we could call with Mozart an “over-listening” (Überhören), a listening that listens in the one to the vibration of various fragments, in each element to the spectrum of possible and impossible elements as well as to the multiple and various elements as one. Kurtág’s Eight Piano Pieces are just an example of this multiple emancipation which tries to make immediately and clearly audible the music longing for over-listening all music elements as Swedenborg’s heaven, that is, as the heaven of the sound of sounding, of rhythm, that interrupts, as breathing, the sounding of sounds. This means that the one in itself differentiated, that into a certain extent defines rhythm, cannot be seized idealistically as a unity of the multiple and diverse, as Schelling proposed, and even less as “music in music,”21 thus the “unity of the musical space,” meant by Schönberg is neither synthesis nor “ordered coherence” among parts. The unity of the one in itself differentiated is rather the fragment, the unique, the 19 20 21 Arnold Schönberg, “Emanzipation der Dissonanz” in ”Komposition mit zwölf Tönen” in Stil und Gedanke, (Leipzig: Reclam, 1989), 148. Ibid. “Die Einheit des musikalischen Raumes erfordert eine absolute und einheitliche Wahrnehmung. In diesem Raum gibt es wie in Swedenborgs Himmel (beschrieben in Balzacs Seraphita) kein absolutes Unten, kein Rechts oder Links, Vor oder Rückwärts. Jede musikalische Konfiguration, jede Bewegung von Tönen muss vor allm verstanden werden als wecheselseitige Beziehung von Klängen, von oszillierenden Schwingungen, die an verschiedenen Stellen und zu verscheidenen Zeiten auftreten”, p. 156. Schelling, F. W. J. Werke, ed. Schröter, (München: Beck/Oldenbourg, 1959), Philosophie der Kunst, §79, 145. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330 330 SCHUBACK flash-sounding of a world, that appears in the own disappearing. The unity of musical space, without inside and outside, without backward and forward, without upper and low, appearing in most various times and places, is the unity of the one that shows itself as one in its own fragmentation. Musical sound is rhythm, the one in itself differentiated, hen diapheron heautōi, when these old Greek words are understood as “becoming in dissolution,” as Werden im Vergehen. Thus what gives to musical sound its Swedenborg’s heaven is precisely its becoming in dissolution, its absenting way of presence, its presencing way of absence. The musical experience of the sound of sounding as rhythm, as caesura, as breathing and comma or interruption of sounding sounds, has been described here as the eruption of the unity of musical space that makes audible how sounding is becoming in dissolution and as such one differentiating in itself. Listening to the sound of sounding, listening to music, a tragic-rhythmical experience of existence is made—the experience of realizing the ek-static and ex-centric structure of presence, its vibrating and pulsing structure, presence as beating heart, presence as being so entirely here and now as fragment that it is impossible to remain there without dissolving oneself. Here, the veil of language is disrupted, as a too fast beating heart disables one from saying a word. Musical sound, in its phenomenality, as sounding, is over-whelming, over-grasping, and over-listening unveiled. Only language is veil, protecting life against life; only human life is language, protection of life against life, destruction of life for the sake of living. Music and language appears, then, as rhythmical difference, the rhythmical difference of an unsolved tension, only seized in its vibrating sustaining. This would mean that every attempt to speak about music in a theoretical way, to bring music to different λόγοι is a loss of the phenomenon, a loss of the musical sound. But maybe it is in the listening to this loss, to the silencing of a sound that may indicate for us, if not a way to describe phenomenologically musical phenomenon, at least a way to discover how musical listening unveils another experience of existence and of λόγος, only possible through the suspension and interruption of common meanings of existence, of λόγος, of phenomenology itself. This listening may learn us to “see abysses where common places are,”22 to recall some words of Karl Kraus, quoted by Webern in his lectures “On the Way to New Music.” Listening to the sound of sounding, we may learn to bring into words, into λόγος, an experience of the rhythmical difference between music and language, between human existence and nature, and maybe we will begin to pronounce thinking words with listeningbeating heart. 22 Karl Kraus. Die Sprache, (München: Kösel Verlag, 1962), 438. RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY 48 (2018) 318–330