Damned Crescendo!

A playful Dive into the Rise of Loud Rhetoric)

 

(A previous version of this text appeared in Musica/Realtà, 2014/03, no. 105, pp. 40-41.)

 

Music history manuals tell us that dynamic markings first appeared in scores with Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sonata Pian e Forte (1597). Some sources, however, point to a Canzona by Adriano Banchieri composed the year before. One of the great blunders of musicology was the idea that, from that moment on and throughout the era of basso continuo, European music relied on terrace dynamics. Today we know this is not entirely true. Yet, for that period, it is still difficult to find precise instructions for using “piano,” “forte,” and, above all, “crescendo.”

 

Textbooks link the “crescendo” to the Mannheim School (Stanitz, Cannabich, Danzi, etc.) and the innovations it introduced in performance practice. Even if crescendos were uncommon before then, they were certainly imagined and even desired. François Couperin le Grand, for example, expresses in his L'art de toucher le clavecin (1715) the wish that the harpsichord might one day allow him to “enfler et diminuer les sons.”

 

If we cautiously accept the hypothesis that the systematic use of the crescendo originated in Mannheim during the second half of the eighteenth century, we can observe that, from that point onward, European music—our music—was enriched—but I would say burdened—by an endless flood of “crescendos” and “diminuendos,” “accelerandos” and “rallentandos,” “pianissimos” and “fortissimos.” More than two centuries of such constant effect-making (what Eckart Altenmüller called Gänsehaut Faktoren, or “goosebump devices”) is no small matter. It is something that does not appeal to me, and I can explain why.

 

Life’s twists brought me to ethnomusicology, which led me to listen extensively to music that has little or nothing to do with Western tradition. This experience changed the way I listen, constantly prompting me to make comparisons. The result is that, outside the West, nowhere—let me say it—is such gaudy rhetoric employed. I therefore see the “crescendo” as the most lurid device Western music has ever invented. One cannot help but regret how frequently it has been abused. In this constant rising of volume, mainstream Western music—meaning the repertoire transmitted through conservatories—is steeped in this market-style effect-making (which surged forcefully with composers of the French Revolution, like Le Sueur, Gossec, and Cherubini). I perceive there the pomposity, arrogance, and ethnocentrism that animated the colonial phase of European history.

 

Of course, not all crescendos are equal. Rossini’s, for instance, in the Overtures to La gazza ladra, Cenerentola, and Semiramide, consists of repeated phrases in which each iteration increases in volume, partly because the instrumental texture thickens, culminating in string tremolos. It is therefore not merely the result of blowing harder or pressing more firmly on the strings. In this Rossinian play, I perceive irony and a desire to entertain. Spontini does something similar in the Ouverture to La vestale, but it is not the same; the comic and grotesque, in which Rossini excelled, is absent here.

 

Fortunately, there also exist sophisticated and refined forms of crescendo. Richard Strauss, in Salome and Elektra, employs a system of leitmotifs whose persistence—and sometimes simultaneous presence—produces an intensifying effect rooted in thematic development. This, too, is not a trivial increase in volume. Something similar, at an even higher level of fascinating refinement, can be found in the gamelan of the Javanese musician Sumarsam, one of the most renowned artists in this indigenous Indonesian genre. Here, however, we are very far from the West.

 

At this point, I think of Schoenberg, who loved to paint, and who, when designing the backgrounds for Die glückliche Hand, attempted to create a kind of “coloristic crescendo” to unfold alongside the music. The crescendo device has become so entrenched in the minds of Western musicians that even when they are not making music, they feel compelled to create some form of crescendo! I think of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, tightening bolts even when there are no bolts left to tighten. Had Schoenberg ventured into haute cuisine, he might have tried a crescendo even with tomato sauce.

 

Even if we can smile at such notions, they are serious matters. Functional harmony allows—more than other tonal systems (Indian Rāg, Arabic-Turkish Maqām, Persian Radif)—plentiful rhetorical effects (perfect cadences, deceptive resolutions, extraordinary resolutions, more or less surprising modulations). We must therefore concede that the European tradition thrives on layered rhetorical effects that reinforce each other, sometimes to a paroxysmal degree.

 

All this has become difficult for me to take; and there is nothing I can do to make it palatable. I might indeed echo Luther at the Diet of Worms: “Here I stand; I can do no other; God help me, Amen!” (Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir, Amen!).

 

I wonder whether this hunger for rhetoric is, at least in part, compensation for the fact that after centuries of Christianity and the “disdain for the flesh,” Western music—the pretentious music of the West (what is called “classical”)—has become entirely disembodied. Indeed, one cannot and should not dance: if one dances, it is not serious; if it is serious, one does not dance. Yet some visceral impulse that we all carry within finds another outlet. The rhetoric of loudness can be seen as a substitute for Elvis’s pelvic movements (who did not use the “crescendo”), who had the merit of reintroducing physicality into widely disseminated music (recall the immobility of even the most famous crooners: Perry Como, Tony Bennet, Franmk Sinatra, etc.).

 

Today, when I listen to music—without necessarily turning to extra-European repertoires—I take refuge in genres that, thanks to the gods, we Westerners have also learned to produce from the 20th century onward: the overflowing oceans of rock, pop, jazz, and world music, where the crescendo is occasional and rhetoric appears in more interesting forms. It is not frequent, nor a structural pillar of their rhetoric. Even the hardest rock, blasted at high volume, cannot employ crescendos precisely because of that volume (think of the historical Nirvana). It is undeniably loud music, but in terms of decibel variation, it is almost ascetic.

 

The moral of the story, in my view, was aptly expressed years ago by Stephen Blum of New York University, who said: “Musicology that does not include the study of non-Western music, lacking comparative terms, is unable to evaluate what is good and less good in the very Western music it claims to study.” The West has still not truly confronted the social use of sound practiced elsewhere.

 

And now, to bring this discussion to a close, I can only say: Your words are yours, my words are mine…