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• Title: Introduction: The Once and Future Orpheus (Critical Essay)
• Author : Utopian Studies
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 180 KB

Description

Ernst Bloch, the most significant theorist of the concept of utopia, reserved a particular place for music. He had studied music at university, alongside philosophy and physics, and played the piano; in 1974 Bloch said that he "would probably have been a mediocre Kappelmeister but for ... a certain talent for philosophy." (1) A large part of his early work, Geist der Utopie, is dedicated to an essay on the philosophy of music, and he returns to the subject in the third volume of The Principle of Hope. The impact of Bloch's early work was considerable. Otto Klemperer (Bloch's exact contemporary) was introduced to Geist der Utopie by Georg Simmel and thought it brilliant; he and Bloch became close friends. In the 1920s, Klemperer was appointed conductor of the avant-garde Kroll Opera in Berlin. Bloch was closely integrated into the intellectual circle around the Kroll and wrote the introductory program article for its first production, Beethoven's Fidelio. Besides writing articles for the Kroll programs and contributing to the music journal Anbruch, Bloch allegedly danced a minuet with Igor Stravinsky at the Kroll's opening performance of Oedipus Rex. (2) At all stages of his life, Bloch insisted that music had a particular utopian role in articulating the Not Yet and, indeed, bringing the future world into being. He makes three distinct claims about music. One is that music's capacity for direct human expression produces a capability of expressing the suffering, hope, and desire of oppressed people. However, like all art, music is socially conditioned--and more so than other cultural forms. There is clearly a tension, if not a contradiction, between these statements. But much of The Principle of Hope can be read as an attempt to recover or expose the residue of concrete utopia in culture, art, and religion. Those elements that are detachable from, or exceed, the immediate conditions of production Bloch describes as cultural surplus, and music, he insists, is particularly rich in this. It is perhaps the existential rather than cognitive response that is crucial; thus Bloch writes that "music is one great subjective theurgy, ... a theurgy that proposes to sing, to invoke, that which is essential and most like proper human beings" or that which expresses "adequateness to our own core." Moreover, "experience of music provides the best access to the hermeneutics of the emotions, especially the expectant emotions," and thus "music is that art of pre-appearance which relates most intensively to the welling core of existence (moment) of That-Which-Is and relates most expansively to its horizon;--cantus essentiam fontis vocat [singing summons the existence of the fountain]." (3)

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