Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music

Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music. By David B. Greene. Pp. ix + 192. (Gordon & Breach.) 1982. $28.

Here we have yet another Beethoven book, this one even ten times more tedious than John Crabbe's Beethoven's Empire of the Mind (which I reviewed in the last issue of this journal) and consisting of almost unmitigated nonsense. However, it has the advantage of providing us with a typical sample of a whole generation of claptrap and of a characteristically American-academic (I think especially American) tendency to "expect fulfilment" (a phrase used in this book) through stating in obscure and involved language what previously was perfectly obvious. Sometimes the obvious is scarcely disguised and becomes painfully obvious: for example, "each sound ... is meaningful largely because of its relation to preceding and coming sounds"; more often a whole page of convoluted language is required to state a platitude, or it takes a paragraph to say "determinism". In this syndrome, inventing new jargons passes for thinking, and the idea is to ignore existing knowledge and terminology in order to invent a new jargon at all costs and thus to appear original, "learned" and, especially, "scientific". One could call it "jargonology" or the obfuscation of commonplaces, the method being to present in a pseudo-scientific style tedious jargon-ridden rationalizations of some preconceived formula bearing, in reality, no relation to the subject supposedly being discussed. (The footnotes refer to a huge bibliography of presumably similar stuff.)

Before inventing a new paradigm of jargonology it would pay better to understand the meaning of existing words, such as "classical". The concept of cosmic order is not equivalent either to determinism or rationalism, neither is "that which endures non-temporally". Bach is classical but not rationalist. What is "unchanging order"? A static universe? There is confusion of "intuition" with "sensation", the use of tautological terms such as "eventful occurrence"; there are pages of rambling about "motion inward"—why not "introversion" and "extraversion"?—concepts that have already been defined and thoroughly understood by anyone who knows anything. Such "motion inward" in Beethoven is not typical of, nor has anything to do particularly with, the nineteenth century. God, or meditation, was not discovered then; on the contrary, the civilization was heading towards complete atheism. The "angry despair or grim resignation" of later Romantics has nothing to do with "revealing and hiding the self but everything to do with the state of the civilization around them.

It is a pity that Korzybski is not required reading for these people, that they might have some training in the basics of thinking and the use of language. He would cure them, if anything would, of endless hair-splitting to state a commonplace. But instead they read and quote people like Heidegger, who write whole volumes, inventing a vocabulary of new words, to say, for example, that the real self is not the same as the personality or conscious ego.

We have much talk about "Heroism", referring to the Promethean aspect of Beethoven that is obvious to everyone else but implies much more than "heroism"; and pages of meaningless verbiage about "living from the past" and "living toward the future" that get us nowhere. For the first movement of the A minor Quartet, op. 132, we are given the invaluable insight that "The movement's temporal process turns out not to exemplify one in which revolution is possible and heroism effective". In 35 pages about this movement we do not even get any correct idea of the form of the movement, let alone of its meaning, but only interminable drooling about such terms as "front-heaviness", "centre-controlled shape" or "end-directed shape". The profound conclusions reached in 179 pages of this are that Bach is classical (in the correct use of the word, which is not understood here) and that Beethoven is a prophet of change. "Past orientation is subordinate to future orientation". Putting it that way is surely worth a Ph.D. in Indiana.

For further consideration of this kind of thing I refer the reader to Orwell's essay on Jargon, and there is also a lecture on it by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. M.McM.