Im Digitalisierungsprojekt „Ernst Krenek lectures online: die musiktheoretischen Vorträge eines Exil-Österreichers“ wurden die im Archiv der Ernst-Krenek-Institut-Privatstiftung aufbewahrten Manuskripte und Typoskripte zu Kreneks Lehrveranstaltungen, Vorträgen und Radiosendungen in einer kuratierten Auswahl online verfügbar und durchsuchbar gemacht, sowie mit begleitenden historischen und biographischen Informationen kontextualisiert.
Digitalisiert wurden rund 90 Schriftgutobjekte mit einem Gesamtseitenumfang von rund 800 Seiten. 75% dieser Objekte sind Manuskripte, die restlichen 25% sind Typoskripte, wobei die Hälfte der Dokumente in deutscher, die andere Hälfte in englischer Sprache verfasst sind. Diese Dokumente stammen aus dem Nachlass Ernst Kreneks und stehen im Zusammenhang mit seiner Lehr- und Vortragstätigkeit sowohl in akademischen Institutionen als auch in Rundfunksendungen.
Textfehler und Schreibfehler wurden übernommen.
Fehlende i-Punkte, Umlautzeichen etc. werden stillschweigend ergänzt. Geminationsstriche werden aufgelöst. Leerzeichen und Abteilungszeichen werden standardisiert.
Fehlende Interpunktion wird nicht ergänzt. In Zweifelsfällen wird das den Rechtschreibregeln entsprechende Interpunktionszeichen erfasst. Striche werden immer als Bindestriche erfasst.
Es werden ausschließlich englisch Anführungszeichen verwendet. Es wird vorlagegemäß zwischen einfachen und doppelten Anführungszeichen unterschieden.
Die Silbentrennung wird vorlagegemäß übernommen.
Der Text wird in Seiten, Textfelder (Paragraphen, Überschriften, Seitenzahlen, Notizen) und Zeilen segmentiert.
In dieser Ansprache am 2. Amerikanischen Kongress für Ästhetik befasst sich Krenek mit Fragen der Zeit im Musiktheater, insbesondere mit den Differenzen zwischen dem zeitlichen Verlauf von Handlungen in realen Leben und deren Repräsentation auf der Bühne, sei es durch reine Aktion auf der Bühne oder in unterschiedlichen musikalischen Strukturen wie secco Rezitativ oder Arien. Er wirft dabei auch einen kursorischen Blick auf die Geschichte der Oper und schließt mit Überlegungen, wie mit den kompositorischen Mitteln der Neuen Musik noch unausgeschöpfte Möglichkeiten für die Gestaltung von zeitlichen Relationen des Bühnengeschehens durch Musik offen stehen.
Dem Dokument vorangestellt ist eine kurze Zusammenfassung.
In opera, two heterogeneous elements enter into intimate
relationships: the stage action, taking its cues and patterns of pre-
sentation from the reality of life, and music, which of all arts seems
to be the most autonomous, following its own structural laws, without
obvious reference to outside subject matters. In the present lecture,
one particular, eminently practical aspect of the peculiar relation-
ships which are realized in opera is singled out for special attention:
the discrepancy of both media in dealing with the element of time.
While the stage action is a stylized replica of the biolo-
gical and psychological continuity of life, music tends to set up its
own time system, dividing time through the agency of the various tonal
occurrences much in the manner of a time measuring mechanism and estab-
lishing by inference a new, purely aesthetic continuity of emotional
expressiveness.
The history of opera shows various stylistic approaches of
the problem of reconciling the opposite principles in an aesthetically
satisfactory way. The bulk of operatic composition thus far resting
chiefly upon the musical idiom of tonality which offers but a limited
number of ways of dealing with the time problem, it is pointed out that
the recent mutations of the musical idiom open many new avenues for
operatic attempts, up to now neither practically nor theoretically
exploited to any consequential extent.
Outline
1. Opera Time and Standard Time.
2. Recitative and Integrated Musical Form.
3. Music and Time. The Problem of Continuity.
4. Stage Action and Time.
5. Pre-operatic Musical Styles and their Relationships to the Problem
of Continuity. (
6. External Retardation and Internal Acceleration.
7. Various operatic Realizations after
8. Opera and the Musical Idiom of Tonality. New Possibilities.
Opera is the meeting place of two apparently quite heteregeneous art forms:
on the one hand, the stage action, by subject-matter and method of presentation im-
mediately related to the reality of life - on the other hand, music, most abstract of
arts, a self-sustained system of auditory symbols, in no tangible way related to any
subject matter outside
The manifold aesthetic problems arising from this challenging combination
of elements have been subject to
examined on the grounds of the rather obvious observation that opera has a peculiar time
of its own, different from that of ordinary life, and also different from that of the
stage play without music. Everybody who has to do with opera knows that the application
of music to a text, as it is usual in the operatic style, extends the duration of the
text to approximately the triple of the duration of the same text, if spoken without
music. This is a very simple rule of the thumb that serves composers as well as libret-
tists and does not seem to be in need of particular elucidation. It is, however, inter-
esting to investigate for a moment the far reaching aesthetical implications of this
condition.
We know that opera very early developed a tendency towards discriminating sharp-
ly between two types of setting the words: the recitative, and the integrated musical
form, such as aria, duet, or other kinds of ensemble singing. As far as the time factor
is concerned, the recitative approaches most closely the natural speed of the spoken
word, so that the action carried on in the recitative sections is hardly slower than it
would be without music. In the integrated musical forms, however, action comes frequent-
ly to an almost complete standstill that has no parallel in the progress of a spoken
play, except in the monologues of the classical tragedy, perhaps.
Discrepancy between the time of ordinary life and the time inherent to the
work of art is very conspicuous in opera; it is, however,
presentation, though less obvious in the spoken play than in the musical drama.
is fundamental about plays is that the scene as depicted on the stage is more often than
not one might say it is almost always in syncopated time in relation to the emotion of
anybody in the audience."(1)
____________
(1) Lectures in America, Plays. p. 93
And further: "Then gradually there came the beginning of really realizing the great dif-
ficulty of having my emotion accompany the scene and then moreover I became fairly con-
sciously troubled by the things over which one stumbles over which one stumbled to such
an
rupted." (2)
____________
(2) op. cit., p. 114.
Whether one experiences this state of affairs as a difficulty, or recognizes in it the
source of the peculiar aesthetic values of dramatic performances, it is true at any
rate that the stylization of action necessary in any dramatic presentation, though in
different degrees, depends mainly on the autonomous fashion in which the dramatic action
progresses in time. Opera, in establishing relationships of a most intimate nature
between action and music, is a particularly stylized form of dramatic presentation
precisely for the reason that it coordinates two time-mechanisms of entirely different
properties.
Speaking in a rather generalizing way, we may say that music acts upon time
exactly in the manner of a clock, that is to say, music measures time. Any musical
process consists of a certain amount of tones each of which begins to sound and stops
sounding at appointed moments, reckoning from the beginning of the process. By these
occurrences the time span taken up by the process in question is subdivided in a num-
ber of time units. Time is divested of its character of a continuum and is imparted
a sort of granulated texture. This explanation seems a little startling, because no-
body appears to experience music in such a manner. And not even the admission that
the acoustical occurrences in a musical process are far more involved and diversified
than the ticking of a clock-work would account for the essential difference between
hearing time cut to little pieces by an intricate machinery and listening to an Adagio
by
between, and connecting intimately, the single elements of the musical process, while
no such motion seems to take place between the time units carved out of the continuum
by a mechanical contrivance. We speak of a melody as moving through different pitches,
of a harmonic progression as moving from degree to degree, we speak of rhythmic drive
and use freely a great deal of kinetic terms in discussing music. Actually it is these
kinetic concepts that make music something different from a succession of premeditated
noises. But it is just as well to know that we are fully responsible for this inter-
pretation of what we hear, because actually in a melody nothing whatever moves: one
tone stops sounding, and another tone begins to sound. Even the most primitive liste-
ner, without knowing it, supplies something behind and underneath the tones of the
melody: a kind of silent, streaming energy, a sort of primordial psychic force whose
subtle and immensely rich motion can be estimated in its beauty by correlating those
points at which it bursts forth onto the surface of audibility, these points being
the tones of the melody which we actually hear. In other words, it is our mental powers
that invest the process with the idea of a continuum of motion after the process by
its very nature had divested time of its continuity. Thus the new, artistic continuity
of motion, as represented in music, takes place in time spans which are, in a manner
of speaking, lifted out of their original context
of ordinary life.
As compared to these conditions the dramatic action is much closer related to
the continuum experienced in real life, since the dramatic action represents the mani-
festations of biological and psychological energies without the intervention of an
artificial medium. If a person on stage lifts a glass of water, it is more or less
exactly the same action as if he would lift the glass in his sitting room. The
may have, and of course ought to have, an entirely different significance due to its
symbolic qualities within the context of the drama. But we know of this special signi-
ficance only through the information which we have received by watching the whole
drama and taking in its particular poetic assumptions. We do not conceive of the stage
action as a mechanism dividing and measuring time and we do not need to imagine a spi-
ritual agency behind the action which would put the single elements together into a
new form of continuum as we do in listening to music; we rather accept the stage
action as a peculiarly significant replica of the familiar continuity of life processes.
It is necessary now to contemplate what happens when two processes of so dif-
ferent characteristics are brought together as it occurs in opera. At first, we have
to distinguish two different types of musical configurations. Not all music is equally
distant from the continuous character of ordinary time. Music that follows in rhythm
and meter closely the inflection of speech is nearest to, music that rests upon rhyth-
mic and metrical systems of a different type is farthest remote from, the continuity
of life. It is quite significant
so far coincided with the prevalence of the second type of music. Plain Chant is gener-
ally known as the prototype of music closely connected with the inflexion of prose. We
do not know of any musico-dramatic works in the style of Plain Chant. The measured
music, musica mensurabilis, of the Ars Nova differs from the earlier stages mainly in
that the duration of the tones of a melody is regulated according to viewpoints other
than the inflexion of speech. Thus music develops its own rhythmic system which, in
the ceaseless recurrence of groupements of basic rhythmic units of equal length, is
the forerunner of the anti-continuous clock-work quality mentioned before. However,
since the regular rhythmic pulsation of medieval music does not yet imply an equally
regular distribution of accents, much of the old continuity of pre-polyphonic music
is retained. And yet, still no combination of music and drama on the grounds of that
style. The spectacular ascent of opera is reserved for the moment when the regular
rhythmic pulsation in the music of the Renaissance is joined by the equally regular
system of recurring accent patterns, by the periodical organization so familiar in
Western music ever since
It is well known that our opera came into being concurrent with the seculari-
sation of art music, that is, with the acceptance by art music of the principles go-
verning folk-music during the middle ages. The modest musico dramatic attempts of
those earlier times, such as Robin et Marion
clock-work type of music, that is, on the regular distribution of accents in symmetri-
cal periods. It is interesting to notice that the artistically trained composers who
made the first attempts in real opera writing tried to avoid this influence which ob-
viously contradicted the continuity of dramatic action. Amfiparnasso, tried with great ingenuity to derive whatever he could of continuity
from a flexible handling of the madrigal style, that is, technically speaking, he
mustered whatever was left in the madrigal style of free accent distribution in order
to match the quick pace of the comedy. Orfeo come closest to a kind of grafting principles of Gregorian decla-
mation on the new harmonic style, and it is precisely in this respect that these com-
posers come also closest to the diction of the Greek tragedy which they strove to re-
vive. However, the future of opera lay elsewhere. It was the same
apparently against his own repeatedly professed doctrine, introduced more and more
metrically bound elements into his dramatic style and established the division be-
tween recitative and integrated musical form. And we have to admit that the tremen-
dous attraction exerted by opera ever since rests not upon the expeditious parts of
the music which are best adapted to follow the continuity of the action, but on those
sections which are musically most elaborate and bring the action virtually to a stand-
still.
Looking more closely into the interrelation between the various types of opera-
tic music, we discover that only the external action is stopped, or slowed down, by
the circumscribed musical structures. During arias, or ensembles, the visible progress
of the dramatic vehicle is interrupted to a great extent, however, the stream of emo-
tion pervading the whole is intensified, which in many cases amounts to an internal
acceleration of the action, setting off its external retardation. The reason is that
the peculiar faculty of music of throwing emotional forces into relief grows in
straight proportion with the amount of freedom granted to music in order to develop
logical structures according to its own, inherent laws. In other words, the most
autonomous, most concentrated and intrinsically coherent musical structure is the
most efficient carrier and the most eloquent messenger of emotional energies. There-
fore it is possible in the musically most fully organized operatic forms, which ap-
pear
time, to depict with surprising brevity emotional movements the magnitude of which
in a medium consistent with ordinary time would require lengthy psychological prepa-
ration. An emotional about-face, for instance, which might appear dangerously on the
verge of the ludicrous in a spoken dialogue, or even in recitative musical treat-
ment, can be made entirely convincing in a coherent musical structure in which the
decisive turning point is presented as inevitable crisis brought about through the
stringent logic of the musical process. Thus opera proceeds in richly variegated
relationships to actual time inasmuch as it has various speeds according to the vary-
ing degrees of compactness of the musical construction. The secco recitative of the
classical opera is to be considered fairly synchronized with the progress of ordi-
nary time. However, ascending gradually to higher organized musical structures, we
arrive at a state of things comparable to those astounding motion pictures which
show an imperceptibly slow process, such as the growth of a tree, in a few minutes,
by projecting in rapid succession a sequence of pictures taken at far distant mo-
ments of the process.
Inspecting the short history of opera, we observe that clear-cut separation
of the varying degrees of internal and external speed was the stylistic ideal of the
18th century, while the early beginnings of opera in the 17th as well as the evolu-
tion of the 19th show a tendency toward assimilating the divergent elements. That
observation is well in keeping with the fact that in the 18th century the clock-work
type of music - regularly pulsating accompaniment, symmetrical periodicity - was
flowering. The romantic doctrine of the 19th century abandoned gradually these musi-
cal features and made music more flexible so that in the late works of
relations is obtained. It is interesting to notice that the most articulate innova-
tors of opera,
involved arrangements, in the name of emotional intensity and psychological truth.
They were aware of the fact that music is particularly capable of registering even
minute psychological nuances indicated by the text, and they wanted to escape the
stifling influences of formalism which seemed to be implied in the constant use of
the strictly regulated structures of the clock-work type. It is true that the clean-
cut division into swiftly moving recitative sections and static blocks of symmetri-
cal musical forms suggests a highly mannerized and generally playful style of the
stage action which seems to counteract the unpredictability of strong dramatic
accents and the tragic mood of uninhibited emotion. The fact that the pedigree of
the integrated operatic forms reaches way back to folk-song and dance leads quite
spontaneously to a stylization of the stage action after dance-like patterns, espe-
cially because the dramatic plot during the presentation of the integrated musical
forms is hardly moving on at all, which invites a rather ornamental treatment of
the stage in those sections. That it is possible to reconcile such heterogeneous
stylistic features is proven in the operas of Giovanni, for example, the extraordinary combination of the genuine playfulness of
opera, as suggested by the formalism of the musical structure, with the unbridled
flow of tragic emotion exploiting the sensitivity and flexibility of music grown
into maturity and fully capable of such expressive versatility, is an almost un-
canny achievement.
All
principles in opera apply to opera as far as it rests upon the musical idiom of
tonality, for opera came into being not until the polyphonic idiom of the church
modes had given way to the bi-modal and essentially harmonic world of the major and
minor keys. In our own time we would be able to witness one of the most interesting
and most significant mutations of the operatic style inasmuch as the tonal idiom is
again giving way to a different orientation which is basically polyphonic and ex-
hibits a fundamental structure of the material far remote from that of the major
and minor keys. This new idiom is at times called atonality. We are, however, not
yet able to observe how opera behaves
only very few operatic attempts of any consequence have been made in this idiom,
and they are very little known, and still less analyzed, or understood. The situa-
tion is obscured by the enormous cloud of neo-classicism which today overshadows
practically the entire horizon of musical practice. Curiosity, courage, adventurous
spirit
almost completely the generation now coming to mature age, and the few pioneers
alive are growing old and lonesome, watching
in their futile efforts of playing safe. And yet, how extraordinary potentialities
are offered by a musical idiom which has evolved new types of time relationships.
How interesting would it be to test the dramatic possibilities of a musical idiom
which combines the rhythmic and metrical liberties of Plain Chant with the rich
complexity of full-grown polyphony. We shall not know about the copious harvest
which we are entitled to expect on the vast new fields, as long as composers per-
sist in writing down to the questionable taste of a commercially-minded minority
easily satisfied with the worst, instead of writing up to the potentialities of
all uncorrupted human beings who have every right to claim the best.