Lumi

Lumi: Towards an Anatomy of Musical Affect The French word lumière activates different possible actions that place the precarious power of light at the center: one immediately thinks of illuminating – bringing light to what is dark – or of casting light, by candlelight, on the finest articulations of something, casting a ray to explore its boundaries. The glow of candlelight is precarious, and the almost unlimited availability of modern electricity has dulled our sensitivity to it. In the century of the Lumières that glow lasts only briefly – like music – consumed by time and capable of illuminating only one side of something, so that it can subsequently be integrated into a whole, the result of a synthesis of all those facets. If the theme of the precarious nature of knowledge is present in baroque culture – where extraordinary still lifes with skulls, dice and candles speak of human vulnerability – the problem changes in meaning in the eighteenth century. Precariousness becomes a value: an element of the human that must be consciously affirmed against the limitlessness of nature. That flicker of light can, utopically, reach the masonic sun of Die Zauberflöte; it must not be claimed merely as a way of feeling, but as a way of acting. To seize a single point – an aspect of experience – and to grasp the most delicate, hidden articulations of it is not an act of omnipotence or a subjugation of nature, but a demand for transparency that, in small steps, can expand to the systematic thinking of the Encyclopédie. There too everything moves under the sign of the human: there is an objective side – the entries, the individual objects that are classified, analyzed and recounted one by one. Yet this objective side must be integrated into a broader design that describes how forms of knowledge are interwoven with the world of human experience, as if systematic knowledge and the study of emotion could never be separated from each other. Romanticism, science and philosophy – embodied in a figure such as Diderot – are in continuous connection: a utopian fabric of small cells that are continuously connected to each other, in hope of a better order that is built step by step. "Dare to know" (sapere aude) means projecting this virtuous filling of gaps onto the entire historical world of human institutions – of art and literature – because people leave traces of themselves everywhere. The realm of nature is indeed a book written in rhetorical and mathematical characters to which everyone has the right to participate, for the style of the world is a discourse of small forms: discursive, not purely linguistic, because there exists a general, rational design in which human limits and understanding by candlelight coexist. And this possibility is a promise to all mankind. The idea of a universal fabric also influences the philosophy of music. It is struck by a remarkable discovery: in the becoming of sound – in the way sounds articulate with one another – there exists a harmonic model in which we never hear a single, pure sound in isolation. Here too an ordering principle is at work: each sound is surrounded by a cluster of other sounds that hover around it, literally resonate within it and determine the field of its possible relations. Thus the formal element and the human element – the experimentalism of tonal harmony and the lyrical richness of song – assert themselves with equal force to tell the world of affects and emotions, of festivity and musical interiority. The choice for Lumi stems from an awareness of this bond, while deliberately choosing a model that is structurally devoid of words: the world of chamber music in its purest form – trio, string quartet – or in the hybrid form of chamber music and serenade, the quintet for piano and wind instruments. One seems to enter the realm of pure form, of the taut logic of instrumental music; yet this is how it appears to us, not to the composers who devote themselves to these genres. On the dvd we briefly discuss the structure of these pieces; we take it up again now to make its meaning explicit from this specific perspective. Thus the fully established Haydn of the Trio in A-flat major relies on a series of theatrical models to describe the boldness of his harmonic conception. The aim is to draw the listener – and the amateur musician – into an extremely refined conversation in which the first cue of one instrument is developed by another. As in a wordless scene on stage, the instruments converse: the violin sometimes echoes the last concertante phrases of the others, sometimes develops them autonomously. Through the dialogic device of mime, the form achieves a relentless clarity, while expressing itself in deeply human attitudes, where utterance and writing are so balanced that neither gains the upper hand. A form of extreme politeness presents itself: no text could support the sign language of pure music. A similar play unfolds in the Adagio, where the piano develops the melody of the violin, comments on it, varies it, ever seeking completion in the magical staccato figures of the strings. An aria is mimed, a concertato, an entire mimetic horizon that lends Haydn's music the lustre of a mirror. The same sense of participation extends to Prince Esterházy's use of the baritone. Here too one begins with a boundary to overcome: an instrument that evokes the popular, that must be inserted into the highly developed composition of a dark string trio – an ensemble where the dark colours of viola and cello interweave. In this sphere there is first of all an awareness of a composition that plays with the timbre of an instrument that is not manoeuvrable, yet capable of stunning harmonic colours, precious dancing drones, quasi-sacred forms of song. Everything must happen together, in the skilful and light evocation of a rural world. The phraseological dimension makes precisely these imitation games possible, allowing the listener to participate in a coded dialogue – what will become a characteristic of romanticism. The same sensation arises when listening to Mozart's Quintet K. 452, perhaps the most celebrated work in this collection: what is dialogue in Haydn becomes dramatic mimesis in Mozart – the theatre of the divertimento, of pathos, of the coup de théâtre. Yet here too it becomes necessary to impose a discipline of transparency on this mode of narration by transforming the various compositional parts into a succession of scenes. One could speak of a form told in figura, according to the old baroque model; but Mozart's paradisiacal world knows much more ironic and earthly accents. Irony is inherent in this Enlightenment habit of rereading genres: if there exists a universal bond in the way the world of experience is organized – if the novel can become an analogue of the science of human behaviour – then every musical form has a doppelgänger in other arts. And this ambiguity is fully expressed in the choice to give a string quartet the title Melancholy, as Beethoven does in opus 18. Melancholy arises from a sense of defeat and at the same time from a process of intellectual overstimulation: confronted with the Sublime – with the immensity of stars or galaxies, confronted with spectacles in which the subjugating power of the infinite bursts forth, whether in the small or in the large – the mind withdraws, in an Enlightenment fashion, within its limits, with nostalgia for a missing fullness that the infinite intuits but cannot comprehend. And after this weariness, which looms from afar until it imposes itself on the listener, follows a dancing, light finale. To end a string quartet with such a powerful contrast is to convey that tension to the transparent dialectic of dramatic form, and to cloud it with a gesture that seems consoling. Lumi thus takes shape in the blending of very clear intentions: behind the theme of classicism lies a profound expressive awareness that – as Charles Rosen rightly remarked – makes it a style, a play of recurring elements that return under an ironic veil and make themselves recognizable. It is precisely for this reason that it makes sense to use instruments that are as close as possible to the originals. The brilliance of modern instruments is certainly overwhelming when set against the airier, opaque and light colours of early instruments. The music of the classical style thus reveals itself as a continuous shift between nuances, which colours the manifestation of feelings in action – their anatomy. The whole world of half-shadows, of the stubborn will to illuminate the articulations of human feeling by candlelight – together with the crystal-clear form of music – finds, in the domain of reduced and allusive sonorities capable of singing without ringing, a profound image of the diffuse function of music and of its deep ethical, social and educational commitment. The formation of refined taste in the individual listener seems to suggest an exercise in humility in listening to the world – precisely the opposite of what Horkheimer and Adorno read in the Enlightenment. Small worlds, small spaces, few listeners compared to today's concert halls: theatres of expressive opacity that ask to be illuminated by candlelight. And thus crescendos – stripped of the natural lustre of modern instruments – acquire a more ambiguous, hidden thickness; they require much more attention. In this directing of the ear towards the warm, opaque world of the early instrument lies perhaps the very sapere aude of the modern listener.