"Mallarmic music"

by Anita Frew.

"Everything that occurs is foreshortened and, as it were, hypothetical: narrative is avoided. Add that from this stripped-down mode of thought, with its retreats, prolongations, flights, or from its very design, there results, for whoever would read it aloud, a musical score." Stephane Mallarme, Preface Un Coup de Des, 1897

Let us try to imagine them in cyberspace - Mallarme, Schonberg and Le Corbusier - bauding together in a virtual and non-linear Modernist chatroom, with Duchamp running around orchestrating the event as a symbol of 2000 "readymade" along the lines of the Nam June Paik installations TV Clock and TV Garden.1

What would these four have made of this module on Whiteness? Did they recognise Whiteness in their own work; did they realise that it would be the subject of serious academic study; did they accept Whiteness as a Modernist cipher; did they even recognise Modernism as an inherent characteristic of their work before the label was conceived or is it truer to say that Whiteness was an intrinsic quality in their art which came to be documented and catalogued as part of the experience of its audience?

In order to try to make sense of the Whiteness thing, I have discovered that it has to be narrowed down, to be reduced. It has many facets - its physical properties, its opacity, transparency and significance in colour and light theory, its evocation of emotions, its historical and racial associations, its psychological significance, its symbols, its role in demonstrating the structure and surface of much of the work of 20th century Modernist artists and architects.

In contemplating this vast expanse of knowledge, writing and experience, I have much sympathy with Manzoni's reductivist tendencies that "we empty this receptacle, free this surface, try to discover the unlimited meaning of a total space".2 He may not have been going through the relatively tortuous process of conceptualising and essay on Whiteness, but, as a methodology, it worked for me in creating the space from which the concept of the musicality of Whiteness emerged.

It would be truer to the notion of the expanse of Whiteness if we could keep to the cyberspace analogy where infinity rules. In the chatroom, Mallarme and Schonberg could commune on Whiteness in music and poetry - Mallarme embodying the musicality of poetry and Schonberg being the atemporal representative of modern music, reflecting the period from Debussy to Webern, Berg, the futurists Russolo and George Antheil, through to Varese, Cage, Stockhausen and Boulez.

Corbusier and Duchamp could make brief appearances as avatars - Corbusier to create the environment where colour does not detract from the music and decoration is superfluous and Duchamp to epitomise the absence of narrative and the element of chance which I would argue shows through in the white spaces and the dispersion in Mallarme's and Schonberg's work.

When I first looked at Mallarme's Un Coup de Des3, in its original form as a purely visual experience, with no textual analysis, it produced an overwhelming and existential desire to "play" it - to reach for the piano keys and interpret the score. Walter Pater has said that "music is the art toward which all the others aspire".

I think Mallarme would have agreed. In many ways, he saw music as the signifier of the transcendental ideal. As he says in the Preface to Un Coup de Des when talking about free verse and the prose-poem: "They are joined under a strange influence, that of Music, as it is heard at a concert; several of its methods, which seemed to me to apply to Literature, are to be found here. Its genre, if little by little it should become one like the symphony, alongside personal song, leaves the ancient technique of verse - for which I retain a religious veneration and to which I attribute the empire of passion and of dreams"4 Studying Un Coup de Des and many other of Mallarme's Poesies and Poemes en Prose, the musical essence comes across strongly - not just in rhyme and meter but also through the vectors of form and content which do much do develop this musical essence. To Mallarme, this musical rhythm, combined with human language, allowed him to aspire to the sublime, to the spiritual and the sacred.5 Schonberg was also at this time influenced by the metaphysical Strindberg and the German symbolists6. Perhaps both were aspiring to the Whiteness of the sublime - the transcendental ideal of another world. Perhaps the notion of the blankness of the origin of time and creation, that Platonic ideal of pure form, of a higher metaphysical realm was an inspiration to their work.

Let us look firstly at how this Whiteness of the sacred manifests itself in Mallarme's work. Between the years of 1866 and 1867, Mallarme was at work on two major poems - Herodiade and L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, (the latter mirrored in Debussy's Prelude7). It was essentially during this time that Mallarme felt he made most progress, when he began to conceive of the integrated totality work, where each poem was both part of and a reflection of the whole - the universal idea, born out of the creative process and not of experience and reflective of nature and the Absolute.

In July 1866, Mallarme yearned for: "twenty years during which I'll remain cloistered within myself, renouncing all publicity other than readings to friends. I'm working on everything at once, or rather I mean that everything is so well ordered in my mind that, as a sensation reaches me now, it is transformed and automatically places itself in the right book or the right poem. When a poem is ripe, it will drop free. You can see that I'm imitating the laws of nature."8 In 1897, a year before his death, Un Coup de Des appeared for the first time in the international journal Cosmopolis. Looking through much of Mallarme's work, it seems obvious that Un Coup de Dess was the representation of the totality - the development and accumulation of his thoughts.

The poem was not originally printed in the double-page format intended by Mallarme. Before his death, Mallarme had corrected the proofs to a deluxe edition of the poem, measuring approximately fifteen-and-one half inches in height and eleven and one half inches in width. This edition never appeared in print but the 1980 edition prepared by Mitsou Ronat comes closer than other modern editions to the specifications that Mallarme designated in that it preserves the spatial and typographical proportions.9

The most striking physical characteristics of the poem are the blanks - the whiteness between the prose - and the dispersion of text. As Mallarme says in the Preface to the poem: "The 'blanks,' in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking: versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centered: I don't transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements." 10 Some critics believe that the blank spaces between the words take precedence over the printed words and that there is an impression of a void, of white spaces invoking emptiness.11 For me this was not the case. I found Mallarme's Whiteness not to be dead, empty or flat but instead energising, positive and stimulating response. I wanted to learn what lay beyond the blanks - the contrast made the text more meaningful. In many senses, the Whiteness contributes as much to the work as the printed word. The blanks are not neutral in that the engender feelings, emotions, recognition and beliefs about Mallarme's thoughts and it is the starkness of contrast of black and white which brings these perceptions into focus.

Whilst reading T.J. Clark's Farewell to Modernism as background material for this whiteness essay, I experienced a similar response on first seeing the photograph of Jackson Pollock's Triad where, as Clark says "the pourings of white had emerged from their black surroundings" and we see the white figures as "flashes of random energy".12

So the whiteness in Mallarme spoke to me. It resonated with the "pregnant possibilities" that Kandinsky saw in the silence of whiteness.13 It made me pause to reflect on meaning, to ponder on the physicality of the text, the rationale for the spacing and the meaning of each word. It also built movement and pace into the poem. As Mallarme himself noted in his Preface: "This copied distance, which mentally separates words or groups of words from one another, has the literary advantage, if I may say so, of seeming to speed up and slow down the movement, of scanning it, and even of intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page."14 So the whiteness builds expectation. Despite the inevitability of the descent into the abyss through the shipwreck metaphor, Mallarme's technique delays the final letting-go into some kind of transcendence. It perpetuates the struggle with the Absolute. Krauss has talked about the "enormous expressive power" which comes at the juncture between stillness and motion and the white spaces in Un Coup de Des seemed to me to evoke this condition.15 Moreover, the dispersion of text, the dominant and secondary motifs and typefaces which on one level convey the rising and falling of intonation, also contribute to this whole notion of chance and temporal confusion. Mallarme has said "everything that occurs is foreshortened and, as it were, hypothetical: narrative is avoided".16

The complete absence of punctuation and the fact that the basic unit of analysis is the two-page spread, as opposed to the line, present a randomness, a facility to assume a patterning or to abandon oneself to the chance throw of the dice and, as such, the format conveys the integral message of the poem. The Whiteness in Mallarme stimulates the underlying belief - that "All thought emits a throw of the dice" and "A throw of the dice will never abolish chance".17

So what would Schonberg and modern music have to say on this influence of Whiteness? Can we find some of the elements of Mallarme's composition in modernist music and what attributes do they convey?

I would contend that Mallarme and Schonberg (remembering here that Schonberg is the atemporal representative of modern music) would have felt much sympathy in their musicality. Indeed, Mallarme conceived of the form of Un Coup de Des as bearing similarity to musical notation: "Add that from this stripped-down mode of thought, with its retreats, prolongations, flights, or from its very design, there results, for whoever would read it aloud, a musical score."18

Indeed, there are many signs of the equivalent of contrapuntal harmony in Un Coup de Des, most notably in the Ninth Folio which has a complex typographical and spatial mix of eight-point italics, twelve-point roman capitals, eight point lowercase roman and eleven-point roman italics, all balanced on the left and right hand sides of the page.

In the second part of this essay, I want to explore this analogy of whiteness in music. Colour in music, in its strictest, musicological sense, is defined as orchestration. Simplistically, therefore, we could assume that, the greater the complexity of orchestration, the more "colourful" the music and therefore minimalist, or modernist music, should be "whiter". What is Whiteness in modern music?

Analysing music is a complex task. We can play around with the components of musical structure - development, repetition, contrast, variation and imitation We can examine rhythm, melody, harmony, texture and form. The soundscape is infinite - all permutations of dynamics, articulation, accent, tempo, phrasing, silence, orchestration, harmonic structure, pitch centres, consonance and dissonance are possible.

We need to explore some of these variables to understand which combinations or patterns exude Whiteness in music. Is Whiteness silence? Could Whiteness be dissonance and absence of harmony? Can we see dispersion in music and does this create the elements of chance and abandonment of temporal norms that we saw with Un Coup de Des? Or does white simply equal "new" in that it is a break from the past, from the Romantic and Symphonic traditions of the 19th Century?

In 1891, just a few years prior to the first publication of Un Coup de Des, at a time when Mallarme was immersed in its development, Claude Debussy watched the total-art spectacle of Paul Napoleon Roinard's Cantique des Cantiques, staged by Paul Fort at the Theatre Moderne. The poetry was augmented by music, colour projections and perfume sprinkled around the theatre. Perfume, light, silence and ambient sound all collided to produce what was considered revolutionary and perhaps symbolic of what would come to be considered early modernistic music. Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune19, based on Mallarme's 1867 poem, was much influenced by new cultural forms, unknown sound zones and the experimental influences of Vietnamese drama and Javanese percussion that the Paris expositions drew to Europe. Strongly influenced by the mythical and epic traditions and resonances of mysticism and occultism which were characteristic of fin de siecle Europe, Debussy found himself in sympathy with many of the French symbolist writers, including Mallarme and Valery and was receptive to music unbound by rules and convention.

In Prelude there is much less influence from diatonic (major-minor) tonality with traditional harmonic relationships no longer the key narrative. So, as with Mallarme, we see spacing and distance bringing whiteness. Similarly, in terms of orchestration, in Prelude, Debussy restricts his theme to the flute, except for brief appearances once each on clarinet and oboe when the flute theme is developed and imitated, but not varied.

Debussy's musical form was also quite new. The Austro-German tradition, the continuous symphonic manner which gives a narrative effect to music, was not for him. He preferred spontaneous associations, analogies with dreams, reflections which mirrored the more random workings of the mind. Towards the end of his life, his creative energies were directed into works of pure music, with no vocal content. The Suite En Blanc et Noir20 revolts against the norm of continuous evolution of musical narrative in composition. It presents music in a process of change, moving in unpredictable directions, where ideas are taken up, developed for a while and then dropped and resurrected at random. Harmonic linkages are transitory but often intense; rhythmn is seldom sustained and a central theme is hard to detect.

Whilst we can see some elements of "whiteness" in Debussy's music - a move towards the abandonment of traditional tonality, an appreciation of the role of colour and the creation of new form, it was Stravinsky who developed the contribution of Whiteness to musical rhythmn and dynamic structure.

Stravinsky's new rhythms invoked much of the new intonations in Mallarme. In 1913, he premiered the Rite of Springin Paris.21 Traditionally, rhythm had supported and intensified melody and harmony. Stravinsky put rhythm at the centre of composition, driving the music, with harmony playing a secondary role. Most of the "Sacrificial Dance" in the Rite of Spring is constructed from cells of from one to six or so notes, not from conventional phrasing. These cells are repeated, often varied and accented, but they require frequent changes of time signature, being of unequal length. The rhythm ignores the barlines (as Mallarme ignores punctuation) and the physical momentum and pace of the composition takes over.

Stravinsky was the master of the blank space and used it to perfection. As the choreographer, George Balanchine said, in admiration of Stravinsky's work: "A pause, an interruption, is never empty space between indicated sounds. It is not just nothing. It acts as a carrying agent from the last sound to the next one. Life goes on within each silence."22

If Debussy was the moderniser in terms of form and Stravinsky the motivator for new rhythmic structure, then Schonberg was the reductivist of harmonic tradition, the artist behind the white walls of "new" harmony. Schonberg was not a natural revolutionary. To abandon diatonic harmony was to lose the principal musical framework that Schonberg most venerated, that of the Austro-German tradition from Bach to Brahms.23 He found the compulsion to move into the realms of atonality deeply disturbing and, indeed, after the first of his atonal works, fell into his own period of "whiteness" and silence for seven years.

It was in 1908, whilst he was at work on various settings of poems by Stefan George24, that Schonberg broke the tonal barrier. He was transfixed by the first words in the text, overcome by George's images of stillness, waiting and separation from the everyday world that his compositions abandoned the development of the poem and, instead, dwelt on that intersection between time and eternity, between stillness and movement which we see in Mallarme.

To Schonberg, this felt like moving into a musical universe no longer bound by the gravitational attractions of and between diatonic keys. He needed a style bereft of foundations and, in his own way, this was his "emptying out" of the exhibition space.25 Paradoxically, without the structure of diatonic harmony, increasing chromaticism was possible and this enabled a plurality of musical forms and associations. So Schonberg's white dissonance was productive and energising, if not initially for himself, then for music as a whole. Schonberg's most gifted pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern quickly followed him into atonal composition. The American composers, like Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles and Henry Cowell appear to have reached atonality with little or no knowledge of what had been achieved in Europe, perhaps because, although Schonberg's scores were usually published within two to three years of composition, most of Berg's and Webern's work remained in manuscript until the 1920s.

Having exposed the white walls, Schonberg retreated into hibernation. So perhaps the whiteness overwhelmed Schonberg. It was too expansive, lacked boundaries, eliminated structure and its infinity overwhelmed him. Atonality had involved a suspension of most of the fundamental principles of musical tradition, which was liberating in itself but it was not constructivist and Schonberg and Berg and Webern found it a difficult canvas on which to paint large form. The vastness of whiteness was too much to bear and, naturally, the desire to conquer it became essential.

The method of control was Schonberg's serialism26: the twelve notes of the chromatic scale were arranged in a fixed order - the series - which could be used to generate melodies and harmonies and which remained consistent throughout the composition. The individual notes of the series could be changed in register by one or more octaves; the whole series could be transposed by any interval, or inverted, or reversed. A theme did not require the twelve notes, nor did the series need to be used as melody. Several forms of the series could be combined in a sequence of chords or a passage of polyphony. Many possibilities existed, but the serial principle provided a basis for harmonic coherence, since the fundamental interval pattern was always the same.

In many ways, Schonberg's serialism mirrors Mallarme's structural use of typography (in terms of style, size and spacing) and pagination. It provides a framework and allows both the composer and the audience to interpret form and structure, to appreciate and comprehend emotion

And what of the musical equivalent of Mallarme's white spaces - the balance of silence and sound? To explore this, we must turn to the music of Russolo, Antheil and Varese and their derivatives (though they would no doubt hate the reference) Cage, Stockhausen and Boulez. The parallels of the "machine age" referred to constantly by Le Corbusier are visible in the music of these modernist composers and so we see music which promoted function, efficiency and post-war renewal. 27

Russolo called for a music that would reflect the sounds and thythms of machines and factories.28 "Machine age music" was soon widely acclaimed, particularly in Paris. Antheil caused a sensation in 1926 with his Ballet Mecanique, scored for eight pianos, eight xylophones, pianola and the bizarre instruments of two electric doorbells and aeroplane propeller.29 Varese's Hyperprism, scored for a small orchestra of two high woodwinds, seven brass and several percussion instruments, together with the use of a siren, also caused uproar in New York in 1923.30 Charles Ives in New York explored atonality, free rhythm, quarter-tone harmony and different metres, using unconventional combinations of instruments, placing musicians in different acoustic positions and giving more autonomy to the performer. 31

A completely new world of sounds and silence was opening up and the arrival of electronic technology was the stimulus to further development. Varese received a tape recorder in the late 1940s and immediately began collecting material for the new "organised sound" he had envisaged. A decade of experimentation followed, culminating in the creation of his Poeme Electronique which was commissioned for the Philips pavilion designed by Le Corbusier at the 1958 Brussels Exhibition.32 The work was totally original in concept - solo soprano with a chorus of bells and organ on tape relayed through many loudspeakers on the interior walls. The building was demolished after the exhibition and Poeme Electronique can now only be heard in stereo, but the spacing of sound with silence, the replication only made possible by electronic means and the overlaying of voice with taped timbres from percussion and wind is very Mallarmic in structure and effect.

John Cage was instrumental in exploiting the new technology and in building forms from numerical patterns of sound and silence.33 In 1938, Cage discovered that he could produce a percussion orchestra under the control of two hands by applying foreign objects, generally rubber, metal, wood or paper, to the strings of a piano. His work with these unpitched sounds led him to use rhythmic rather than harmonic means of construction, believing duration to be fundamental, shared by both sound and silence. Cage's Prelude for Meditation and Music for Marcel Duchamp exhibited clashing harmonies, shadowing of sounds, abrupt cessation of noise and resonant echoes, with a complete absence of narrative of which Duchamp would have been proud.34

Cage's 4'33" is perhaps the best known of his work.35 In this work, originally given by a solo pianist, there is no notated sound at all: the musicians are silent - the piece being the sounds of the environment. 4'33" is often referred to colloquially as Silence but Cage had discovered the non-existence of silence in Harvard University's anechoic chamber, a sound-proof room without any reflective surfaces where he sat hearing only sounds of his nervous system and his heartbeat.

Susan Sontag has talked about the value of this Whiteness of silence: "Silence doesn't exist in a literal sense, however, as in the experience of an audience. It would means that the spectator was aware of no stimulus or that he was unable to make a response."36 Musicians often use the term "rests" to indicate the silent space of time that carve sound into distinguishable patterns. However, much take place in these white spaces of silence, however lengthy they may be. These are not empty segments. Audiences are stimulated and Cage's 4'33" is the audience's response to silence. It encapsulates and represents the effect of Whiteness.The Whiteness of Cage's music is also reflected in his Zen-like ideal to make compositions "free of individual taste and memory in their order of events" and, in many ways, this is very Mallarmic - reflecting the notion of chance in the concept of letting the sounds be themselves in a space of time.

In 1959 (the same year as 4'33"), Cage composed his Music of Changes for piano in which, for the first time, he determined musical events by means of random coin-tossing.37 The sounds and their order were dictated by chance but the piece is fully composed in that the notation is complete and must be observed by the performer.

Also in the 1950s, Boulez's Third Piano Sonata and Stockkhausen's Kkavuerstuck XIsought to mix chance with the Schonberg's serialism and created something which was startlingly Mallarmic in composition.39,38 Boulez showed the pianist various options in making his way through material. There are different possible orderings for the five movements of the sonata and a mix of choices within each. The opening movement of the sonata, 'Constellation-Miroir', shows arrows indicating the different possible routes through the material. Boulez also uses precise indications of pedalling and silently depressed keys, marked in small type, to give a plurality of piano sounds. In the original, the movement was printed with the sound constellations widely dispersed and coloured to evoke different meanings and interpretations - almost entirely replicating the format of Mallarme in differing typefaces and disposition of text.In Stockhausen's piano piece, the player is presented with a single sheet bearing nineteen fragments of music to be performed in any order. There are some rules. After playing one fragment, the pianist must glance over the page for another and then play that according to markings of tempo, loudness and touch given at the end of the last. A fragment could be performed twice and the piece was to end as soon as one had been played three times.

So Boulez and Stockhausen saw Mallarme as the scion of "aleatory" art (from the Latin alea, meaning "dice". Boulez, in fact, produced a portrait of Mallarme. His Pli selon pli was developed for soprano and orchestra and is based on five Mallarme poems.40 The conductor is given the choice of compiling given passages of music in different ways; the soprano can choose from different vocal lines and the rhythm is liberated by selection of tempo, silence and mobility. Stockhausen's Zyklus, a work for solo percussion, used similar aleatory notations and symbols.41

For Boulez, aleatory structure along the lines of Mallarme gave him the means to explore freedom of construction. In his second book of Structures for two pianos he writes: "Does a musical work have to be considered as a formal construction with a firmly fixed direction? Could one not try to regard it as a fantastic succession in which the'stories' have no rigid relationship, no fixed order?"42 The similarities with Schonberg are striking. One of the main impulses to Schonberg's atonality was the desire for freedom; to escape form and material which had been exhausted, not just in terms of its own configuration, but also in terms of its symbolism. Boulez saw aleatory structures as particularly appropriate to Schonberg's atonal music in that they permitted randomness, dispersion and flight towards infinity. Modern music has continued to explore new structures and forms in the past few decades through the work of Brian Eno, La Monte Young, Terry Riley in ambient and techno music and their derivatives but they are subjects of investigation in their own right and we have already consumed too much white paper. It is time to log off.

Whiteness has a profound contribution to make to the work of Mallarme and modern music and, as we have seen, there are many parallels between their form, structure, influence and motivation. The horizontal and vertical vectors in music and poetry deconstruct in both cases, with the dispersion of text and the abandonment of traditional melodic and harmonic structure. They break from the past; they show a predisposition to chance and freedom from temporal norms; they demonstrate the power of that kinetic energy that exists in the moment between stillness and motion and they aspire towards the Whiteness of the sublime, the Absolute, freedom and infinity. Mallarme and the modern composers may have found Whiteness difficult to live with but they found ways to tame it and to use it to show contrast and meaning in their work. Whiteness, finally, was creative, productive and energising.

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Anita Frew leads a "portfolio" life, combining a Ph.D at the London Consortium with directorships of a number of companies. Her particular specialism at the London Consortium is digital art and new media. She is also heavily involved in the London theatre world, being on the board of the Donmar Theatre.

copyright 2000© Anita Frew and www.art-omma.org, design plex