Kafka's Jewishness, in music (as is everything else on this blog)

I do believe this work represents Kafka very well. This is the first movement of Viktor Ullmann's Piano Sonata no. 6. Ullmann, a Czech Jew, wrote this during his time in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and its expression of angst is evident - the tremolos in the beginning, as well as the adiatonicity of many of the rows of chords, displays that. Kafka was also a Czech Jew, who no doubt faced persecution as well. Although Ullmann wrote his sonata 30 years after The Trial was written, both Ullmann and Kafka would have faced similar experiences of Jews - Ullmann was in Nazi Germany, and Kafka was in Austria-Hungary, which was desperately trying to suppress all of its minorities in order to hold onto its empire. "Der Prozess" contains themes relating to Jewish oppression - the only entire name of the main character, for example, is Josef, a good Jewish name. Furthermore, when Josef is detained, he is detained by men named Rabensteiner and Kullich, a German and Czech name respectively, showing the reality at the time that everybody was against the Jews.

Beethoven and Alice in Wonderland

Perhaps Carroll would have been listening to music of this style if he had been born 100 years later. Carroll was, after all, very conservative in his mathematics teaching. Although new mathematics were being rapidly developed in his time, he still used Euclid's books as his guide, and was very meticulous in going through it. He wrote a play called "Euclid and his Modern Rivals" which asserted that nobody can write a better geometry textbook than Euclid.

Thus, I think he would be a rather musically conservative person as well. This sonata movement is an example of relative musical conservatism in comparison to what was being produced in Carroll's time, the middle-to-late 19th century. By then, the late Romantic period was underway, and composers like Beethoven were considered old music.
It was the opinion of some intellectuals, though, like Aldous Huxley, that good music ended with Beethoven, and although there are no sources available on Lewis Carroll's music tastes, I believe I can assume he shared the same opinion as Huxley.

Neoclassicism and Bulgakov?

I find assigning musical works to authors quite helpful in helping me understand the authors better. I am more familiar with musical trends than I am with literary trends, so choosing a musical work helps me contextualize the author better. Furthermore, I can look for themes that I find in the music in the text.

Perhaps Bulgakov would have been listening to this at the time of his writing The Master and Margarita, if this had been written when he wrote his first draft. Actually, this is not the work that I wanted to show at all, but I couldn't find a good link to Concerto Spirituale by Lourié. Quite the shame, really.

Neoclassicism is a musical movement in which composers sought to imitate the Classical forms of music. It usually had its own 20th century tinge, as can be heard in this work, but sought to be closer to old music than new music. This work, Symphony of Psalms,is a fine example. I feel that it relates to Bulgakov in that Bulgakov's book offers critiques of modern Soviet life with its lack of religion. This piece would certainly be banned in the Soviet Union for its religious themes as well as its stark differences to Soviet music of the time.




"Day after day, life gets even happier!"




Soviets were a fan of "proletariat music" - that is, music they deemed proletariat, as opposed to bourgeois. They came down harshly upon the avant-garde movement, as well as jazz music. Prokofiev and Shostakovich were the main Soviet classical composers, and they wrote cheerful pieces based on folk themes glorifying the Soviet Union. Anything else was anathema to the government. Stravinsky moved to France in the 1920s, mostly because the lack of copyright laws in the early Soviet Union prevented him from getting much money for his works, but his emigration also permitted him to write whatever he wanted.

Some remarks on Sorabji's music

Kaikhosru Sorabji is perhaps my favourite composer. I find much of his music absolutely stunning. Unfortunately, I am no music analyst, and consequently know nothing about the way music is made, nor do I know what to look for when composing music. Here is a sample of a part of one of his works:



His music seems to be highly structured. When I first heard the piece, it sounded to me like someone playing random notes on the piano. When I heard the music more, though, it became clear that Sorabji knew exactly what he was doing with all those notes all over the place. I don't believe he chose these notes randomly - the work, despite seeming to be formless, has actually got an underlying order. The chords have got rather linear movement between them. This work, despite sounding consciously atonal, is not so. It is a development of the late Romantic tradition and the idea of increasing chromaticism taken to its logical extremes, perhaps more like an extreme form of Scriabin than Schönberg. It does not take the leap towards conscious atonality and arrhythmia the way many contemporary works do, but instead opts for subconscious atonality and arrhythmia that seems to arise naturally, as opposed to the serialists who built their works out of consciously designed tone rows, combinations of the 12 pitches. This work was created in 1930, as a sort of response to Busoni's Fantasia Cantrappuntistica, a work of the late Romantic period, but it is more than a reply - it transcends Busoni and incorporates new ideas into it.