Gotham Diary:
Concerto
19 June 2014
With the end so far out of sight, I’m wary of beginning any kind of commentary about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I can report I that read most of Book 1 in a day. Perhaps that’s the perfect beginning.
But a perfect beginning wouldn’t require immediate qualification: this was a book that I could put down — I just didn’t want to. I never felt captured, as one does by thrillers and the like. Someone told me — and this point, this note of intimacy was never made explicit in any of the reviews of the newly-translated third installment that I read — that reading Knausgaard was like listening to a friend, somebody you cared about and somebody who knew you. My friend and Knausgaard are about the same age, and that isn’t the only reason why I wouldn’t describe reading Knausgaard in quite the same way. But Knausgaard writes as comfortably as an old friend talks. He is never boring, and he is never bewildering. And because the things he writes about are the things that you talk about with an old friend, you have to take what I just said on faith, because to listen to anyone who wasn’t a good friend talk about them would be boring and bewildering — often, at the same time.
I can also report that my pleasure was not in the least diminished by the fact that I would never — once I went off to boarding school — have had a friend like Karl Ove. If it’s a bit premature to speculate on the nature of his struggle (although I’ve already got a very clear idea of it), I can tell you that my struggle has always involved steering clear, not in myself but in others, of a masculine impulse that Knausgaard, in his easygoing way, nails in one sentence. It comes from the mordantly funny recollection of his hopeless high-school rock band, in which he may very well have been the least gifted player. Why did he persist? Listen:
And the louder I played it, the closer I came to that ideal. I had bought an extra-long guitar lead so that I could stand in front of the hall mirror and play, with the amplifier upstairs in my room at full blast, and then things really started to happen, the sound became distorted, piercing, and almost regardless of what I did, it sounded good, the whole house was filled with the sound of my guitar, and a strange congruence evolved between my feelings and these sounds, as though they were me, as though that was the real me. (95)
As Kathleen says to me, “You never liked rock because you love music.” And that is true — I always loved music. My childish taste was inclined toward the cute and schmaltzy, but I went straight from 101 Strings to Mozart. I never felt that music expressed my feelings; rather, music taught me how to feel.
***
Classical music was born in the courts of princes, where professional musicians provided entertainment. It was pretty much dance music at first, but by the end of the Sixteenth Century the mathematical nature of music, which had always been understood by philosophers, and the practical limitations of uninitiated audiences, were brought into direct conflict. A nice word for this conflict is the word that was coined for the occasion, concerto, which according to the etymology that I prefer jams together the ideas of togetherness and competition. The challenge of classical music has always been this: how much can you get away with without making the audience fidget and yawn? How can you repeat themes and rhythms while keeping them fresh and alluring? How to be new and different without being alienating?
Courtiers, who soon learned to educate themselves in the appreciation of courtly entertainment, gave this competition a rein more free than it might have had; they were inclined to do so because the appreciation of “difficulties” so quickly became a status marker at court. These “difficulties” could not be very serious. If a connoisseur wished his opinion to have any currency, he might be at the head of the pack, but he must also be of it. And so a gradual process was set in motion, a dialectic between musicians and courtiers. By the time the third estate was allowed to sit in on the sessions, the game had developed a highly sophisticated differentiation between difficulty and novelty. This is most clearly seen in the very late work of Mozart, which was driven by the determination to write new music that was informed by old learning. Mozart was regarded as a relatively difficult composer at this stage, because, instead of novelty, he introduced the spirits of Bach and Handel, long forgotten by most musicians and completely unknown to the listening public.
This game, this dialectic, came to an end round about the time that the power of the European courts did — somewhere between 1910 and 1920. Throughout the previous century, the connoisseur might not actually be a courtier but he listened like one. (And bear in mind that from its origins until the middle of the Nineteenth Century, opera was an art form that only princely courts could afford to mount. Le Nozze di Figaro was permitted as an opera because only courtiers would hear it; productions of Le Mariage de Figaro as a comedy in German were strictly prohibited.)
What I’ve said of music here applies in one way or another to almost all the art forms of the modern West; at the core of each artistic endeavor, there was, during the courtly era (which we now call the ancien régime), a tidal tug between innovation and familiarity. This came to an end when artists refused to “play” with the nouveaux-riches who took the place of courtiers after the second, and final, collapse of the ancien régime during the years before 1918. From now on, “modern” art would be all about difficulty, and hang the audience if it couldn’t keep up. This “modern” phase appears to have come to an end. Whatever has taken its place, we are still left with glorious legacies of the courtly patronage of the arts.
It seems to me that intelligent people sooner or later get over regarding art produced in courtly environments as bearing the taint of that environment. But ever since World War II, it has been axiomatic for intelligent but idealistic adolescents to reject the courtly arts, as somehow contrary to social justice but also as demanding not just performing but responsive skills, thereby betraying the inequality of intelligence. I suspect that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s personal struggle involves overcoming the puritan aesthetic of the hip adolescent. (Where there used to be God, there is now “congruence.”) But his achievement, I think, is to have produced a rich and complex novel that is is no way beholden to courtly culture.
Daily Blague news update: Cronies.