The spirit of utopia ernst bloch pdf

Mahler is German, or at least wants to count absolutely as a German composer, which fails, for this is truly Judaism in music, Jewish grief and Jewish fervor: and then StrauJf has to put up with comparisons to Meyerbeer. It is not easy to sort him out. He is conventional, and one can see in him the industrious man who knows how to enjoy life and take it for what it is. But just for this reason, and in spite of it, Straug is good company.

He has no kernel that needs to ripen in some other direction than from the serenade arbitrarily upward to Elektra and then back down again to satisfy the new plutocracy's need for self-enclosed melody, then to the Rosenkavalier, in order finally to attempt salvation in a very euphonious, very erotic fairy-tale mysticism. It is animated enough to convey conflict and the most excitable subject matter, but never so moved with seriousness that real expanse or a multimovement event could arise from it.

It is therefore no accident that StrauB prefers Berlioz and Liszt's single-movement form, whereas not only Schumann and Brahms but, more importantly, Schubert, Mahler and Bruckner, the true inheritors of the Beethovenian spirit, retained the symphony's multimovement form, the form of dramatic expanse, the Beethovenian protcltype. With Bruckner song finally returned to the world, singing with a clear conscience.

He learned from Wagner, but the overheated character, the "blood-soaked" score has vanished. What we love about him is his warmth, his conviviality, and the joy of the wayfaring, which had been lost. Bruckner additionally demands absolutely no sacrifice of genuine temperament, after all, nor even of true, contentual, objective intensification. The first carpet, that ofchamber music, has thereby been regained.

Just for this reason, of course, Bruckner has been maliciously reproached for all sorts of things: ponderous and disparate diction, longeurs and then fits and starts again, at least in the terminal movements.

The way it weaves together is certainly often enough peculiarly wide and formless, sketchy. For precisely the finale is usually fashioned such that it noisily, laxly and formlessly dismisses the listener back into the quotidian. In Bruckner the finale is not supposed to scatter the audience; it has much more been developed as a musical ecstasy, as an admission to the most spatial and objective part of music generally. Here, even in Bruckner, only the deeper, and in the current state of compositional technique irresolvable, difficulty of the musical finale as joyfol final chapter still impedes us.

That is so in Beethoven and of course in Bruckner as well: a formally posited but unproven brushing against the edge of heaven. There is a light at the end of the tunnel! Insofar as the latter lies too far from the burning kernel of the soul, from the pure self-vision working toward one single point, from the properly lyrical ontologism.

Recently Bruckner found in August Halm a devoted exegete of his ability and his situation. He was questionable and tasteless, and some of that never entirely receded. He churns and froths together so much that had already been shaped, so that it would really be present: there to begin.

But now singing-to-oneself came back into favor. Before him, only the simple, homophonically composed tune with a modest beat was still known as melody.

Here it seems to have become possible that the old self-enclosed vocal melody might persist within symphonic practice. False Polemics In fact it was no longer so easy to remember. One could neither hum along, nor even transport it discretely. What were people not willing to say against it, and what sorts of meanness would they not unearth!

And certainly not as though the connections here had been merely superficial, for what could already have been broken? Would it be, perhaps because he "could" not make them to order, the old operatic pieces? Further, the form of the delayed resolution, in its literal sense, is only recognizable at the end as shape, synopsis and "form," with all the virtue of its gigantic arcs, its sparse cadences, and the dominant tension of an act gathering itself seemingly only poetically.

But that does not yet grant. The song can also flower into an aria, with breadth and all the release one could want, elevated, sonorous and emotional. The next element was facilitated by dance and the syncopic effect. In this way, though of course not only in this way, the beat is variously broken up; indeed, exaggerating to make a point, one could say that the beat is transformed into a thousand beats, and the unstable, richly syncopated polyrhythms make room for every polyphony.

Every one of the many voices ringing out simultaneously again has something to play, a solo; melisma binds itself to harmony, harmony to rhythm and rhythm to the totality of syncope's new chronological structure, now no longer just empty, unblended, extraharmonic, but purely harmonic, and, additionally, audible as musical drama.

This can no longer be understood as a gentle hovering, in other words. Here the old rustic dances are more likely to have preserved the more forceful movements.

Even today every savage tribe has its changefully mysterious whirling, and from there to the dancing of dervishes and David's dance before the Ark of the Covenant takes perhaps less than a step. The dancing dervishes, for their pact, take pact in the dance of the houris, indeed of the angels, as they dance in circles and whirl about their own axes until fits, coma, and sidereal ecstasies ensue.

Hence the dervish takes on the different kinds of circular movement as a duty, as ibn TufayPO explains; even Dionysus the Areopagite praised the circular movement of the soul as its withdrawal into itself, no longer of course to. It is also probable that the conception of the stress before the rest as a rhythmically articulating fermata in the chorale is not old, as unavoidable as it has become for us. This picture only changed with the emergence of the Italian and French galant composers.

In their craving for more lively movement, however, they did not fall back on the old peasant dances. Indeed, the earlier introduction of mensural notation had opened the way to a more divided beat. But all that extended too far over into impracticability, sonic and artistic irrelevance, into the study score and mere theory.

Hence the situation would only change through the incorporation of the old folk dance, by Bach above all, which after all reaches far back into the past, has faithfully preserved many primitive elements, and, as the music of the Hungarian Gypsies still shows, is not too far removed from polyphonic music's more diverse rhythm.

It is odd enough that Wagner, after coining the well-known phrase that Beethoven's Eighth Symphony is the apotheosis of the dance, then turns around and denies Beethoven's music, just because it is so tied to dance, the ability to overstep certain limits of musical expression. That means that a note in a monodic sequence is already active in the direction of the tonic. The musical pace everywhere comes from the feeling of the dominant and the cadence, is guided and melodically drawn by it.

Where then but in the chord, in harmony, could an opportunity, a compulsion or a directive for the search be demonstrated? Bach is great, and his fugues are an unforgettable admonition: but he maintains his influence, on Beethoven as well as on Wagner, essentially as a richly filigrane harmonist. In other words: the chordal energy is not a product but a prius, and in no way only theoretically. Insofar as it most of all reciprocally intensifies, fuses and guards the fire of the melismata, and so at the same time allows the most fruitful articulation of the richly interrelated succession ofthe new harmonic counterpoint.

Thus did the tempestuous sonata become heavy and redolent again. Even less do we have the Ring in mind, which is subservient to the pagan dance and so often drifts into vacuity or dreary animality. Here, however, human beings again step forward out of the realm of destiny, in order that, in the musical space that forms the homeland and the mythos, the metadramatic lyricism of redemption may appear as the proper object of transcendent opera: it begins in Tristan.

Now we advance into ourselves, just as quietly as deeply. The others are agitated and always lead back out again. Tristan and Isolde have fled the bustling day, they do not act. It is our own inmost dreaming, to be found where words and steps no longer hasten.

One can already see it in the prelude, as it abducts us from time. For it spins out only the same ahistorical, abstract Sehnsucht motif, touching nothing, floating freely, bur ready to descend and be incarnated. Its place becomes bright, but just beyond it everything remains distant and still. Only the first act acquires a charge, leads these two people away from the day. Here everything is still shrill and mocking, all too conscious, and the love potion leads us to the wrong gate. But neither Isolde nor Tristan would need this drink to find the other.

Here two human beings advance into the night; they go from one world over into another, and otherwise nothing happens, as one should be able to recognize from the first act and certainly the two last acts, and nothing sounds but the music of their advance and their ultimate disappearance.

Only the final scenes are still animated, or bring themselves to an end in a superficially visible way. Perhaps that is necessary in terms of stage technique, but like Pfitzner one cannot avoid the impression that the day thereby intrudes again, j ust where one has become the most sensitive to it.

Certainly, but significantly not everywhere, Melot, Brangane, and Kurwenal, even Marke sing differently. One can sense the change in tone when the daytime people speak, these stupid wakeful adults as such, and when the two who are consecrated to the night speak. Indeed, even there one has the irresistible impression that there could not even be such an extremely quiet music if Tristan and Isolde could really die, if in that other world a longing did not still bind them to this one, which is why after all Wagner in his first draft wanted to have the wandering Parsifal appear at the mortally wounded Tristan's deathbed.

It need not be this way, of course, for sound has no limits. It is strange enough that Tristan and Isolde could even vanish from us, that even in sound, where they are so profoundly supplied, they have nothing to say to us. But then it only seems to be the dusk, of course a faraway one, and not the night to which the music of Tristan, still earthly, processual, relates.

Certainly the self had never been so thoroughly exploded and so decisively ceded to the other. Who has truly been to the other side does not return unscathed. He is way off course, as though his feet were bleeding, or-it depends-he can see further. And again: "0 Konig;. Daytime phantoms, waking dreams, deceptive, coarse and utterly senseless in their acute banality.

But there is another hero and his journey. There is still another sun to be found, not opposed to but beyond the night. Toward this sun j ourney the four human beings in Parsifal, filled with a different longing. Kundry survives in fairy tales as the ogre's slyly good-natured wife or the devil's grandmother.

Parsifal himself, the hero who first brings fertility and then completely abstains, can not so clearly be disentangled. Early on he assumes the role of Thor the thunder god, who must repeatedly snatch the solar cauldron from the control of the giant Hymir, who lives in the East, the land of the primordial waters.

Here Wagner strengthened and deepened every aspect, adding the consecration through love. In him, chastity and purity have become absolute: Parsifal is thus no longer the exuberantly gushing youth of astral myth who splits the clouds and brings a purely natural fecundity; quite the contrary, he transforms the magic garden into a wasteland, and the fallow land of the grail territory is blessed with a quite different sun than the day's, and a quite deeper daybreak than that of the earth's merely natural summer.

Where the night of love did not succeed, the holy night did: at its fountainhead was won the beautiful meadow, the enigmatic light of Good Friday morning. But then the dumb man shall speak, And the deaf man hear the word And right away decipher The dark and godly symbols; Then they will journey toward the dawn. If they are to find each other, Then all of you must pray. If they who wander lonely Should ever find each other All the world will be at its goal.

For no one acts here as the human being he could or would be. Is this man, so boastful, a hero? Is this other a god? Siegfried suffers, and with feeling and farcical blasts of the horn pursues his meaningless impulses. Mystery is shoved back on the Noms and Erda, whose authority is unconvincing. Any prospect within this work that could lead out of the narrowness of personhood does so only by serving up a world of cardboard, greasepaint, and irredeemable heroic posturing.

Feeling, acting human beings become almost entirely painted marionettes, against which the violations, indignities, impersonality and superficial universality and abstraction of this delusion plays itself out. All of this does not abolish their mere drivenness, and the music just as often recoils into its almost military drumroll, or into its wide, basely, low-Iyingly general espressivo as the fitting place for this strangely subjective animal lyricism.

Everything thunders and flashes, the fog speaks, and yet it does not speak, for everything blurs together, and the predetermined word interferes.

It must be achieved, however, this other volition; it is only now gathering the strength to open the inner door, if not break it down. Beethoven was on this path, with his virile, bold, morally objective strength, and this strength alone can make things mystical again, rightfully mystical. Wagner would not wait until his very own, the sound-word [ Tonwort] came, but it is precisely the gifted composer who must ultimately be able to remain fully detached, absolute, and to see where his art leads that he at first only pardy knows, and can explore only through resoluteness, and into which immeasurable interior of his realm radical expression takes him; without any influence by the poetic, which, even in transcendental opera, must far more remain just a variable, and in the end loses every correlate in the face of m'usic's suprarational, different correlate.

Otherwise everything is dragged so far down that we do not even enter into consideration, and the unconscious, pathological Will reigns alone. Certainly individual souls put up a certain resistance, but not that of the principium individuationis, only the minimum basis generally needed for a theatrical realization, even an undramatic one. This is not the new, solitary persona that can speak only of itself and must let others decide if they can find themselves therein, nor is it the persona of the folk song or minnesang that speaks of the lover or the old man as such, as a collective type.

Of course there are demands that cannot be fulfitled historically, according to the position of the higher clock. Parsifal-mystery became operative. To that extent one can say that Wagner diverged from the self's Luciferan orientation, to which music since Beethoven has been born; and Wagner's sonic motion, the born illuminator of the soul's higher realms, along with and because of the utterly mistaken, Schopenhauerian-Hindu definition of music, there veered off into the delusory and the poisonously, pathologically mysterious, where in the complete freedom and resoluteness of objective music the burgeoning glossolalia, that is, the Luciferan-Paracletan willing of the human music-spirit itself, could have proclaimed the mystery, the mystery of the intelligible Kingdom.

But still, without Wagner as fore-. Thus a long line ends. Sound does not yet "speak" ; it is lucid enough, but as yet no one entirely understands it; it is a fervent stammering, like a child's, and the presumptive, on its own authority prescriptive or even j ust conspicuous "poetry," at least in the musical drama, disrupts the sound as much as itself, its own equally subordinate, indeed subj ugated power.

It is and certainly will remain weak enough. For too many, hearing would come more easily if they only knew how they ought to talk about it. That has to do with the highly insecure and derivative way people feel together.

If this were not so, musical listening would be less distracted and nervous. The middle class lives with music because it loves sociability and reads the concert reviews, whereas the inaccessibility of the discourse of painting makes it appear quite remote, as a field where one cannot help but miss the target.

The ability to hear is and will remain weak in comparison. For in music there never were any Winckelmanns, and the new ones are only Leopold Schmidt. Paul Bekker is a very clever man, but he often makes us forget that, and his anecdotal book on Beethoven does not always do him honor. The question of opera has come under discussion again thanks to Busoni above all, as well as to Pfitzner's critical stimulus. Then we grasp immediately what is being called out to us. A glance, but far more an inflection, is clear in itself, without detours.

We feel: this is us, this is about us, we too would call out like this, behave like this. The larynx, always quietly innervated, lets us see and understand, from the inside as it were, what is being called out to us and speaks.

Moreover, we also know no better way to express ourselves than through inflection. What circulates within it, in other words, what the singer or player "puts into" the sound, is more important than what the song contains purely tonally. For in itself the latter sets only a very general mood, strongly subject to the user's whim.

Attack Far too little would ever be clear without it. It remains crucial to see the one who is musically calling or striking here. We know how often a song can have changed masters without any listener becoming aware of how very incredible such a change often is.

How could the most diverse strophes otherwise be set to the same music? One might of course object that such a thing does not happen with the same composer. Or that Mozart, in accordance with his partly Italianate nature, is hardly the perfect model of the meaningful allocation of notes to words.

But then Bach is an utterly German composer, and the richest, most powerfully expressive melodist as well. So we always have it only from within ourselves, and not out of the sonic motion, what this motion means. Without a performance, sound remains blind. Certainly sprechgesang faithfully coexists with the spoken word's sonorous life. B ut the former is only understandable when seen from above, and not even the most detailed recitative could tell us what kind of weather prevails in the upper regions of the text.

Matters stand no better, in fact far less favorably, with the language of melismatic excitation within both accompanying and absolute music. Just as often, as in the " Huldreichster Tag" motiffrom the Meistersinger, which with a small barb in the middle descends an octave through a triad, the expression is exactly contrary to the descent:: and when in the overture the ascending march theme in the horns infringes on the jubilant " Huldreichster Tag" theme descending in the strings, it is truly not this countermovement within the orcheStra that decides the success or failure of this music.

But the same applies to such naturalism as to sprechgesang : without any prior human application there could be no such equivalencies, and that even the most analogous formal qualities could not by themselves point us to the spirits hiding in their uppermost logical regions. So it is the touch, the delivery alone that make the speaker's fortune, that makes him a speaker; sound wants to turn towald a human being.

For it is still empty and uncertain, what is happening sonically. It is hopeless to allocate the music to already definite emotions. Not even whether a melody even can unequivocally express anger, longing, love as such-that is, if it is these emotional contents, already experienced by us anyway, at which music aims, and where it could easily excel a statue-is so easy to identify, once its upheavals begin to slur together.

First, applied sound makes every event more acute, penetrating, sensuous. For as listeners we can also still get in close touch, so to speak. The ear is slightly more deeply embedded in the skin than even the eye. It is not as if sound dragged us down, but it fills in well, and so lets us sense something as real. Therefore we bristle at having to watch a silent film, not without reason. But then the ear assumes a peculiar function: it serves as the proxy of the remaining senses; from things it removes alive their crackling, their friction, and from people their speech, and so the film's musical accompaniment, however vague or precise it may finally be, thus comes to be felt as the exact complement in its way to the photography.

Everything underneath must therefore already begin appropriately, and provide a certain density. The singing, the sound must be nuanced, and not only actualize by removing, but also by committing a more fervent human being, by calling out. Consequently the sound must be able to save itself up; at every place where merely simple if also animated life speaks, it must be restrained as dispassionately as possible.

But that often makes everything insufferably overheated and melodramatic, where the word, the compulsion to reality, does not at all require it.

And j ust at the place where sound makes things flowery, dulls the edges, and clothes every reverie in pleasant reality, meaning in this case by musically reversing the inside outward. Just the reverse: only it! Of course it has been hody disputed that sound can go that far. It undoubtedly sounds irresistible to say: If! Not for nothing has the history of musical forms had a chronic difficulty in accommodating the material of musical inspiration.

Poetry's mission would then be, to be contentual: it must relinquish sensuous particularity, that is, make room for music, and provide it, as concisely as possible, often by displacing the plot into symbols, the fundamental moods as well as the dramatic substantiation, the necessity, and destiny from the realm, accessible only to poetry, of a logic of forms and complexes.

Much of this is as correct as it is astute, and it is inthesting how astute something incorrect can often be. There is certainly an empty, calculated kind of work, and a fraudulence that acts Beethovenian when nothing but vacuity is apparent, where the thematic fabric is not even reflection, but rather has become just what the tutti passages used to be, namely patterning.

Pfitzner equally has a point when he notes certain lifeless passages in Wagner where the recitative has nothing to say, because the text also has no drive, and where the leitmotif is inserted into the music not out of the purely symphonic necessity of a recapitulation, but only conceptually, as a sort of pedagogical point of orientation. If one merely observes how just a good song originates, one notices how little the mere particularities are enlivened.

An utter focus on the essential is at work here, such that, in Rudolf Louis's apt observation about Hugo Wolf, the whole piece is spun out in an overridingly absolutely musical development, as it does not so much take up the particularities of the text and its emotional immediacies, but rather keeps to a basic mood from the beginning or from the course of the text, which is then realized as music and laid out as the accompanying polyphony of this essential, basic mood.

It goes without saying that here a concise, conspicuous action, often made legible through. Fourth, however, even the verbal totality of the plot is thus latently overtaken by the note that first sounds with us, the subjectively suffused note.

A poor text is already easy to disrupt in itself. It is superfluous, and wherever it appears it makes itself laughable next to the music which it wants to clarify, whose mood it wants to breathe out. It is especially not groundless that nearly everything becomes too lofty when sung, that in opera even the poorest boatman rows with a golden oar. Or differently again, when a journeyman and then the students break off in the middle of the dance and announce the Meistersinger in fourths in a harmonically marvelous succession, as though the subject were not these complacent dignitaries but rather the entrance of the heavenly host.

Here, above all, the silliest things are said about some sonic item. Here the prattle about the expressive pleading of the 3 2nd notes, the merry laughter of the violin's trill, the uniso'h g ringing out three times after the scherzo of the C minor Quartet as if to ask: "Where am I going in this world? Here, with his explanatory chatter, lodges the smug philistine who believes not only to have said something, but to have set-.

Certainly he would claim in later years that an earlier time had been more "poetic": " Everyone used to feel that the two sonatas of Opus no. Thus it matters little if Wagner represents things, even historically, as if one had to proceed from the sound back to the text again, and not the other way. It is and will remain the destiny even of the better text, however, even the poetically most valuable one, even the most musically involved one, to be completely caught up in the music, to go begging before the sound.

Of course Nietzsche asks if we can imagine someone who could take in Tristan's Act 3 without any help from words or images and yet not expire before this echoing of numberless cries of joy and sorrow. But why should he not? And something else must already be very decisively emphasized here before we proceed to the particulars of the tonal, harmonic, rhythmic and contrapuntal nexus. I seek, when I listen, to become richer and increase in content.

For one can also proclaim and prophesy in art. One will not always be able to locate the shaping sensibility in its merely formal precipitate. Nothing could be more false, incidental and art-historically restrictive; it is equally alien to everyone who must testify, no farther from the child who draws, the peasant who whittles, than from the great artist.

Listeners already get home by a different route. Precisely from here and from now on, artistry may again appear as a displaced prophetic gift. Of course what has not been said does not exist, but it is the will, the content, that commands the means. And these days it seems that one no longer so rigorously, so technically needs to keep at a remove from what is said in order to hear it as a statement.

But here it is beheld essence which constructs its own body, and when this body, the form of the realization, the external reality of the work, appears denaturalized or to a high degree abstractive, then this is a retrospective impression, and moreover primarily abstract only in relation to the natural occurrence of the represented object. For in itself the new Expressionistic formulation of essence is just as "naturalistic" and merely descriptive, if not so completely descriptive of astral perfection as the gravestones bearing the name of Horus, the relief at Bel Merodach or the winged bulls of Assyria and of Ezekiel.

It is the strange power of these times that one can hold the reins seemingly more loosely, or to be exact, more unconsciously, and yet steer toward our true home. The issue, every time, is the content-"what" of what is upper-case Human, and of the pure ground, held open but still mysterious. The Philosophical Theory ofMusic Nevertheless this also does not mean that any discussion of music must end in disaster j ust when it tries to go deeper.

One need not be afraid of slipping; the good listener has his definite, still artistic place. The only thing is to find a point from which one can cast a gaze into the utopian realms of significance seen through the work's windows, so to speak. It is not hard to push ahead into this other way of listening. Even the latter remains for the most part appreciative, passive, leisurely, and thus still completely lost in the void. It already contains all depth, but on this level, as the initial mere indulgence in sound, is as yet unusable, is false, random, arbitrary.

For only what is shaped can appear, which after all we have said is not to demand that the shutters be kept closed in order just to trace only the faint, circumscribed light shining through the cracks. Nonetheless, what operates behind it, full daylight, also contains "form" or has form within itself at least as a lower objective determination, and by this determination there reappear the concepts of the individual composers, of the composers as concepts. Here the sound acts above all as a means for expressing oneself, as a medium that must be broken but nonetheless conveys us buoyantly.

Hence on this longer musical-historical stage of presentiment" sound once again appears ItS the one experience that was meant, as the explosive ''Aha! There is consequently an automatically creative aesthetics, a not only annotative but spontaneous, speculative aesthetics, and only here, in its interpretation, will "absolute" music be established, only here will music's utopianly expanding castle be revealed.

Only in us can it blossom and awaken. The sound is intensified by us, qualitatively colored and at once dispersed. We alone are the ones who raise it up, even more: who make it define and animate itself with our life.

Of course it is no accident that just this tender, transparent body is chosen. As surely as intoxication is not in the wine but in the soul, just as perceptibly is there something in the natural sound that floats and speaks toward the other side, and this makes it alone suitable as musical material. Harmonic Theory As Formula So what counts is to sense oneself all the way through.

It is more than mere dexterity, and much that appears inadvertent derives from extremely cool deliberation working with proven methods. And yet as soon as Kreislel, the Kreisler who everywhere burrows into infinitude, stands before the total, resounding musical reality, he is displaced from the formal margin to the real center: the scaffolding has long collapsed, he coincides again with the deeply moved layperson, the reality of modulation is the miracle itself, which lives in the inner spirit.

Even so, we possess a large number of excellent books on theory, and if in the pages to follow we refer to Schonberg's book to settle the practical issue, that is not-however agreeable we may find this-because a creative composer wrote it, who only aspired to a descriptive and not a natural system, but rather for the more profound reason that it is typical that here precisely the most accomplished methodologist is concerned that form not become such an end in itself that it excludes its object.

Whoever can, may compose as he pleases. Here everything breaks up powerfully for someone who inwardly must. For him, however, if he knows technically what he is doing and personally what he can leave aside, absolutely nothing can still be ugly, impermissible or dissonant.

He may compose in free, floating divisions of time; indeed, he may write any sonority, even if it seems to have absolutely no harmonic derivation and I:an be justified only through the voice leading. Thus one can no longer even speak of nonharmonic notes. Every sonority is possible, and may for that reason alone, as purely a sonority, be posited as harmony. It seems impossible to exclude it from the score, to say nothing at all of the fact that the entire dominant effect has been shaped and comprehended only on the basis of a maintained tonality.

The note from which it all emanates can hover quietly in the air, after all. What thus results is a kind of infinite harmony that no longer needs to announce the departure and destination points every time, and even less may fear j ourneys of discovery in the broad fields of the tonal vacuum. Anyway, it has been the case for a long time now that it is no longer the cadences that govern the harmonic developments of a piece. If this rule is to be achieved, then all leading tones must stay out if they cannot be tied, and above all certain proportions must be observed within the modulations, as Classical composers actually did.

But one simply cannot act free, and exploit every possibility of such a condition, while not wanting to face the actual dangers and obligations of being free. The' song then concludes with "new," "infinite," or "unfulfilled"; it trav- , els without arriving, the meaning is in the wayfaring, and the formerly i1 J operative center, the root, or the stationary voice, the sustained pedal or even j ust its ideationally perceived requirement, which only becomes real.

Anyway, when Schonberg requires a deeper ubstantiation, the harmonic almost always becomes the contrapuntal. Our definitive emphasis on the inner necessity that explodes, besides dissonance and tonality, all of harmony's independent expressive correlations, thus proves itself in the most favorable way.

What is more, just as the seven former Church modes have dissolved, so will the two remaining scales, major and minor, someday perhaps find their dissolution in the chromatic scale's affinity for leading tones.

Already the augmented triad beginning on the third degree of the minor scale cannot still be perpetuated as emotionally a minor chord. Therefore the new chord is only then written when what matters to the composer is to express something new and incredible, which moves him. This can be a new chord, too, but Schonberg as well believes that the unaccustomed chord is only assigned to a hazardous post in order to accomplish the extraordinary, in order to say, in a new way, what is new, namely a new human being, in other words in order that the new sonority can help a new emotional world achieve symbolic expression.

The Spirit of Utopia plays a significant role in the hisrory of German social, political, and cultural thinking. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start. These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in , published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, , in the versIon here presented for the first time in English translation.

The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one.

In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt ro rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and ro reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives ro continue disrupting.

The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines. That's hardly anything. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines.

The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come.

This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse.