CXXIX: On Huxley, on Chromatic Gesualdo

This one is a bit too cryptic for my liking. I’m fairly cryptic as it goes, but I would prefer to distance myself from the overly esoteric; and this one is just ridiculous. So I’ll give a little background on this rabbit hole of a topic.

Carlo Gesualdo was a composer in 17th century Italy, known for his very early contributions to chromatic music (music that involves a higher density of crunchy, razor-sharp sounds as opposed to most ‘rule-abiding’ classical pieces) not practiced again until Beethoven some 200 years later. Chromaticism, embraced much in the eventual romantic period, can be understood as an enchanting, compelling style of composition for how notes and chords are “allowed” to bleed and blend into one another, in compelling or even shocking ways. In the case of Gesualdo, shocking was much more than a musical style.

After some years of his first marriage, Gesualdo discovered (shall we say, happened upon) the act of an affair between his wife and a Fabrizio Carafa, another nobleman. He killed them both at once; and, it appears, followed to lead a career of atonement through music, isolation, and relentless physical contrition. Gesualdo was rewarded no legal punishment for his actions.

It is suggested that the subsequent music of the ‘mad prince’ reflected his lifelong attempt at penitence. I say nothing as to whether or not he succeeded at this. Emphasis on words such as "love", "pain", "death", "ecstasy", "agony", known also as word painting, contribute greatly to this belief. Aside from this, his deep furrows into chromatic work in general would have been seen as quite avant garde and emotional for his time.

This sonnet comments on a scene conveyed by one Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, in which he found a particular coincidence noteworthy when some songs (madrigals) of Gesualdo were played immediately after Mozart one day. In his words,

“Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place.

'These voices' I said appreciatively, 'these voices – they're a kind of bridge back to the human world.'

And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince's compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.

'And yet,' I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, 'and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...'"

I do not know whether Huxley intended to make any similar comparison to the one I see in his experience, but something rather significant stands out to me. It isn’t exactly right, either, the logic that gets me there; but at the end of my fallacious logic I ask myself the question: does chromaticism evoke something important for the human experience? Is that what struck Huxley so, when, in direct contrast to the devout (albeit experimental) classical genius called Mozart, he then heard the raw notes of a debased and guilty man? In Christian rhetoric, fallen and penitent?

I have found that those to whom I ask why classical music seems, betimes, to be obsolete, tell me that it is because it is wholly unrelatable. It is too perfect, too clean cut, too pretty and laced and high brow for a dirty world of working and sinning, commuting and day-by-day dying. We do not have time for “completely coherent” works. We have time for whatever can feed us just enough rapture to cut through our misery.

That, I think Huxley may agree, is what Gesualdo offers us. Perhaps it is what Beethoven, Wagner, Debussy, Grainger, and all the chromatic romantics offer us: the hint, or the promise of meaning within the fractured and tortured disintegration of everyday life.

I may be wrong.

~~~

From out the gramophone sweet Mozart played

his prelude with his bright Mozart-y lilt;

but paused to hear the tortured songs displayed

by poor Gesualdo, racked by endless guilt.

“These voices are a kind of bridge,” it’s said,

“back to the human world,” it’s clarified.

Back to the human world? Where men are dead?

Or back to when they sang before they died?

It is so very human, though, I nod,

that one of life and death should write this way.

That one so very guilty should thus prod

these kinds of songs that kindle our dismay.

For when we’ve had enough of Mozart’s cloy,

we come back home by way of painful joy.