The Center for Humanities commenced its Spring Lecture Series, “Revision and Translation,” on Monday, Jan. 23 with Harvard University’s Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Daniel Albright. Albright, who teaches in the Department of English and American Literature and Language explored the question, “Can Music Translate Anything?”
The lecture was so wide-ranging, erudite and eloquently delivered that it resists being summarized. It derived from Albright’s interdisciplinary studies in what he referred to as “comparative art,” a melding of literature, music, theater and visual art. He drew on his integrated scholarship to investigate whether music, predominantly Western classical, can ever truly tell a story. Music and language are intimately related; composers and analysts use literary terms like “phrase,” “theme” and “motif” to refer to sub-units of a piece, while “tone,” “lyricism” and “composition” are used to describe a verbal passage.
Albright began from the premise that music exists as a translation of emotional states and looked deeper towards its potential for specificity and narrative. He posited literary analogies for common musical forms such as the fugue, which becomes the “predicate” for its subject—the subject being a short melody that is then repeated and recombined with itself and other derivative material to form the rest of the piece. In other words, we could interpret a fugue as “what happens to its subject,” a kind of narrative.
Albright incorporated musical examples ranging from Groucho Marx to Claudio Monteverdi into his talk, and referenced the composer Richard Strauss, who boasted of being able “to depict a big toe appearing from beneath a robe” using only an orchestra. Albright also cited the ominous, roaring “dialogue” of the slow movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, which pianist Krystian Zimmerman compared to Jesus before Pontius Pilate. Other famous works excerpted were Charles Ives’ Second String Quartet, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” and the “Metamorphoses” of Benjamin Britten, inspired by Ovid’s poems of the same title.
In the end, after considering both hypotheses for and against narration in music, Albright concluded in favor of a compromise. Any effort to apply principles of rhetoric or semanticism to music necessarily falls short—instrumental music cannot convince you of a specific viewpoint, or give you directions—but isolated moments of narrative power do exist. These moments are irregular and nonspecific, extending from the hunter’s trumpet in “Peter and the Wolf” to cannon fire in the “Eroica” symphony. True literary narrative, however, is impossible.
In an intriguing side note shortly before the end of his lecture, Albright compared music to a language without nouns, incapable of denotation but constantly in motion. Is music a language? Sonic art? A series of cultural codes? While these questions may not be answerable, the unspoken message of Albright’s talk seemed to be that consideration of one art in the framework of another is always fruitful, to test its limits and to more clearly understand the reactions that it provokes in ourselves.
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