MUSIC AND PLASTIC. (1) THE ARTS OF FORM

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST BY OSWALD SPENGLER VOLUME ONE FORM AND ACTUALITY pp 219-255.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.219

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic ideas) that of the arts of form, of which the number is legion. And with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds; had these been brought within the domain of arthistorical research instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorialplastic arts, we should have progressed very much further in our understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the formative impulse that is at work in the wordless arts can never be understood until we come to regard the distinction between optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such things that divide one art from another.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.222

Its theory, technique and convention all belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in or absent from a particular Culture all these are questions of Form in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that authorship-attributions can be based on them. [...] Hitherto it has been supposed without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the supposition involves that the several "arts" specified in the conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed) are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating patrons to guide "art" on its "way."

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.222

I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of "mankind" through the stages of "ancient," "mediaeval" and "modern," a notion that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.224

All Classical building begins from the outside, all Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling. The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding, something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-twilight exists for the faithful only that is the factor common to the highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithraea and Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type, there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwellinghouse, begins to be brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and nonexistent in the temple.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.225

The art of the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant to be seen from the front it is a variant of plane-relief. And the seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few of them there are) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence. Music takes the lead in Faustian art.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.226

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century, music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental voices, as means wherewith to -paint.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.227

Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract hypothesis of "eternal art-laws." "Painting" is a mere word. Gothic glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped figures were built up as cathedrals were. [...] Similarly "music" is a mere word. Some music there has been everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetrachords, chromatic and enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning: but this is the very difference between body and space. This music was single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was probably akin in tone-colour to the harpischord.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.228

Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which, according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay from grave. Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West without distinction is marchmusic. Such is the impression that the rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the Chinese soulThe [music of the] castle and the cathedral as representatives of the becoming and the become.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.229

Along with this there came into being in castle and village a secular imitative music, that of troubadours, Minnesanger and minstrels. [...] After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective singing the rondeau and the ballade. All this is "art" for a public. Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism of its linear progress. Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction between waking consciousness and living existence, between the spiritual and the knightly singer.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.230

Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But the new-born "orchestra" no longer observes limitations imposed by the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other voices at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of Descartes.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.231

The theme of the fugue "is," that of the new sonata-movement "becomes," and the issue of its working out is in the one case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures we get a cyclic succession, and the real source of this tone-language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and most intimate kind of music the music of the strings. Certain it is that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of full illumination. Here, in chamber-music, Western art as a whole reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses that of intense bodiliness.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.232-233

The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden's bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann's song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. But the Renaissance, when it had mastered some arts of word and picture, had shot its bolt. It altered the ways of thought and the life-feeling of West Europe not one whit. It could penetrate as far as costume and gesture, but the roots of life it could not touch even in Italy the world-outlook of the Baroque is essentially a continuation of the Gothic.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.235

If the Renaissance had been a "renewal" (whatever that may mean) of the Classical world-feeling then, surely, would it not have had to replace the symbol of embraced and rhythmically-ordered space by that of closed structural body. But there was never any question of this. On the contrary, the Renaissance practised wholly and exclusively an architecture of space prescribed for it by Gothic, from which it differed only in that in lieu of the Northern "Sturm und Drang" it breathed the clear equable calm of the sunny, care-free and unquestioning South. It produced no new building-idea, and the extent of its architectural achievement might almost be reduced to facades and courtyards.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.239

The background, hitherto casually put in, regarded as a fill-up and, as space, almost shuffled out of sight, gains a preponderant importance. A development sets in that is paralleled in no other Culture, not even in the Chinese which in many other respects is so near to ours. The background as symbol of the infinite conquers the sense-perceptible foreground, and at last (herein lies the distinction between the depicting and the delineating styles) the depth-experience of the Faustian soul is captured in the kinesis of a picture. [...] Now, that a landscape painting should have a horizon has always seemed so self-evident to us that we have never asked ourselves the important question: Is there always a horizon, and if not, when not and why not? In fact, there is not a hint of it, either in Egyptian relief or in Byzantine mosaic or in vasepaintings and frescoes of the Classical age, or even in those of the Hellenistic in spite of its spatial treatment of foregrounds. This line, in the unreal vapour of which heaven and earth melt, the sum and potent symbol of the far, contains the painter's version of the "infinitesimal" principle.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.243

With this is connected an important principle of composition. [...] The sort of perspective composition that is so self-evident to us is a particular case, and it is neither recognized nor intended in the painting of any other Culture. Egyptian art chose to represent simultaneous events in superposed ranks, thereby eliminating the third dimension from the look of the picture. The Apollinian art placed figures and groups separately, with a deliberate avoidance of space-and-time relations in the plane of representation.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.245

The strict style in Classical painting limited its palette to yellow, red, black and white. This singular fact was observed long ago, and, since the explanation was only sought for in superficial and definitely material causes, wild hypotheses were brought forward to account for it, e.g., a supposed colour-blindness in the Greeks. [...] But why did this painting in its great days avoid blue and even blue-green, and only begin the gamut of permissible tones at greenish-yellow and bluishred? It is not that the ancient artists did not know of blue and its effect. The metopes of many temples had blue backgrounds so that they should appear deep in contrast with the triglyphs; and trade-painting used all the colours that were technically available. There are authentic blue horses in archaic Acropolis work and Etruscan tomb-painting; and a bright blue colouring of the hair was quite common. The ban upon it in the higher art was, without a doubt, imposed upon the Euclidean soul by its prime symbol. Blue and green are the colours of the heavens, the sea, the fruitful plain, the shadow of the Southern noon, the evening, the remote mountains. They are essentially atmospheric and not substantial colours. They are cold, they disembody, and they evoke impressions of expanse and distance and boundlessness. Here's some Spenglerian Gender theory.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.246

Yellow and red are the popular colours, the colours of the crowd, of children, of women, and of savages.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.247-248

Arabian art brought the Magian world-feeling to expression by means of the gold ground of its mosaics and pictures. Something of the uncanny wizardry of this, and by implication of its symbolic purpose, is known to us through the mosaics of Ravenna, in the work of the Early Rhenish and especially North Italian masters who were still entirely under the influence of Lombardo-Byzantine models, and last but not least in the Gothic book-illustrations of which the archetypes were the Byzantine purple codices. [...] The Magian felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the worldcavern with their spiritual substance and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour. As compared with simple yellow, it produces a complicated sense-impression, through the metallic, diffuse refulgence that is generated by its glowing surface. Colours whether coloured substance incorporated with the smoothed wall-face (fresco) or pigment applied with the brush are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.249

Our desire is to see in the work of the painter not merely something that has become but something that is becoming. And this is precisely what the Renaissance wanted to avoid.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.250

At the same time with this, there appeared in Western painting another symbol of highest significance, which subdued more and more the actuality of all colour the "studio-brown". [...] This brown does not repudiate its descent from the "infinitesimal" greens of Leonardo's, Schongauer's and Griinewald's backgrounds, but it possesses a mightier power over things than they, and it carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close. It even prevails over the more primitive linear perspective, which is unable to shake off its Renaissance association with architectural motives. Between it and the Impressionist technique of the visible brush-stroke there is an enduring and deeply suggestive connexion. Both in the end dissolve the tangible existences of the sense-world the world of moments and foregrounds into atmospheric semblances. Line disappears from the tone-picture. The Magian gold-ground had only dreamed of a mystic power that controlled and at will could thrust aside the laws governing corporeal existence within the world-cavern. But the brown of these pictures opened a prospect into an infinity of pure forms. And therefore its discovery marks for the Western style a culmination in the process of its becoming. As contrasted with the preceding green, this colour has something Protestant in it.

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.253

I have called brown a historical colour. By this is meant that it makes the atmosphere of the pictured space signify directedness and future, and overpowers the assertiveness of any instantaneous element that may be represented. The other colours of distance have also this significance, and they lead to an important, considerable and distinctly bizarre extension of the Western symbolism. The Hellenes had in the end come to prefer bronze and even giltbronze to the painted marble, the better to express (by the radiance of this phenomenon against a deep blue sky) the idea of the individualness of any and every corporeal thing. Now, when the Renaissance dug these statues up, it found them black and green with the patina of many centuries. The historic spirit, with its piety and longing, fastened on to this and from that time forth our form-feeling has canonized this black and green of distance. To-day our eye finds it indispensable to the enjoyment of a bronze an ironical illustration of the fact that this whole species of art is something that no longer concerns us as such. What does a cathedral dome or a bronze figure mean to us without the patina which transmutes the short-range brilliance into the tone of remoteness of time and place? Have we not got to the point of artificially producing this patina?

Quote from: Spengler vol I p.254

We have already in an earlier chapter discussed the wistful regard of the Faustian soul for ruins and evidences of the distant past, its proneness to the collection of antiquities and manuscripts and coins, to pilgrimages to the Forum Romanum and to Pompeii, to excavations and philological studies, which appears as early as the time of Petrarch. When would it have occurred to a Greek to bother himself with the ruins of Cnossus or Tiryns? Every Greek knew his "Iliad" but not one ever thought of digging up the hill of Troy. We, on the contrary, are moved by a secret piety to preserve the aqueducts of the Campagna, the Etruscan tombs, the ruins of Luxor and Karnak, the crumbling castles of the Rhine, the Roman Limes, Hersfeld and Paulinzella from becoming mere rubbish but we keep them as ruins, feeling in some subtle way that reconstruction would deprive them of something, indefinable in terms, that can never be reproduced. Nothing was further from the Classical mind than this reverence for the weather-beaten evidences of a once and a formerly. It cleared out of sight everything that did not speak of the present; never was the old preserved because it was old.