Purpose
In a filmed interview, the pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963) revealed that Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) Prelude in B Minor Op. 32 No. 10 (1910) was inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s (1827-1901) painting, Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming, 1887).[1] See Example 1.
Example 1. Die Heimkehr (1887) by Arnold Böcklin[2]
Böcklin’s painting depicts a man returning home, apparently overcome with a flood of memories. The mood of Die Heimkehr resonates with Rachmaninoff’s own nostalgia for the Russia of his youth, which he expressed in his letters and correspondence.[3] The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) developed a vocabulary that proves useful in a systematic study of the subjective experience of memory depicted in Die Heimkehr and the Prelude. I will draw from two works by Bergson in this study, Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896) to frame my musical analyses.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson distinguishes time from space, explaining that a spatial representation, utilized in a clock, cannot fully account for an individual’s rich perception of time. [4] Bergson calls his vision of experiential time durée (duration). Consider the familiar phrase “Time flies when you are having fun,” where the emphasis is on the quality of time perception. Bergson frequently uses music as a metaphor to explain his philosophical concepts, perhaps due in part to the influence of his father, Michał Bergson (1820–1898), a composer and pianist who studied with Chopin. To further illustrate duration, Bergson states “Like the successive notes of a tune by which we allow ourselves to be lulled and soothed…pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another.”[5] The notion of tones “melting” into one another, exhibiting a fundamental continuity in duration, will figure prominently in my musical analysis of time perception in the B Minor Prelude.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson emphasizes the important role that memory plays in the experience of duration.[6] He posits that there are two general forms of memory, habit memory and spontaneous memory. Habit memory describes motor actions, involved in such mundane habits as brushing our teeth or driving a car. By way of analogy, it’s this type of memory that musicians refer to as muscle memory.
The second form of memory, spontaneous memory, is more elusive. Spontaneous memories are triggered by an external stimulus, such as a sound or image that reminds us of intimate personal experiences with a highly emotional component. Thus, spontaneous memory resembles “involuntary memory,” a term that was frequently used by the novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), who was thoroughly familiar with Bergson’s ideas. In the famous “Episode of the Madeleine” from Swann’s Way (1913) the narrator eats a madeleine cookie dipped in tea, and is immediately overtaken by remembrances of his childhood.[7] In the passage below, Proust describes an experience of this type of memory.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.…But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.[8]
Interestingly, Proust may have been directly influenced by Bergson’s concept of spontaneous memory because they were cousins by marriage, and often met for discussions.[9] I will argue that Bergson’s second notion of memory resonates with the aesthetics of the Prelude.
In this study, I will use Bergson’s concepts of duration and spontaneous (now termed episodic) memory as a lens with which to explore how musical material in the Prelude turns back on itself in recurring remembrances of its past, in a process that mirrors themes from Die Heimkehr and Rachmaninoff’s writings.[10] My musical analyses will draw from Schillinger, Schenker, and Roman numeral analysis, aiming to illustrate the unique temporalism of Rachmaninoff’s musical language in the B Minor Prelude. The result will be to demonstrate Rachmaninoff’s unique approach to piano writing, which frequently has been discredited as anachronistic. Hopefully, this study will suggest a new methodology with which to explore the concealed innovations in Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom.
Significance and State of Research
Bergson’s notions of duration and spontaneous memory resonate with the arts, exemplified by a number of Bergsonian studies in film and literature, as well as a small but significant body of Bergsonian studies in music.[11] In his article “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg,” Keith Salley analyzes Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, from a Bergsonian perspective.[12] Salley first demonstrates that Schoenberg owned a copy of Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) and took extensive notes in the margins. He then speculates that Bergson’s ideas may have influenced Schoenberg’s compositional process in the Op. 19 piano pieces. Whether or not Schoenberg was directly influenced by Bergson, Salley argues that Bergson’s concept of duration resembles Schoenberg’s approach to developing variation. Another informative foray into Bergson’s ideas in relation to music is explored by Vanessa Sylvie Amélie Pelletier, in her Master’s Thesis “In the Time of Bergson: The Influence of the Philosophical Thoughts of Henri Bergson on the Writings and Music of Dane Rudhyar,” points out that the American mystical composer Dane Rudhyar’s musical style was directly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy, and that Bergsonian analysis uncovers metaphysical meanings in Rudhyar’s music.[13] Both Salley and Pelletier begin their articles by establishing connections between Bergson and either Schoenberg or Rudhyar. It is not my intention to continue this line of inquiry since there is no direct evidence to suggest such a connection with Rachmaninoff. Nonetheless, as I hope to demonstrate, in the parallelism between Böcklin’s painting and Rachmaninoff Prelude, Bergson’s ideas form the common denominator.
Michael Klein, in his article “L’Isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage” finds cultural resonances between Bergson, Debussy, and Watteau.[14] His study examines the possible connection between Antoine Watteau’s painting, Le Pèlerinage à L’Isle Cithère (1717), and Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse (1904). Klein’s analysis derives from the concept “assemblage,” used by Deleuze and Guattari, which he defines as “a multiplicity that territorializes natural, cultural, biological, and artistic phenomena…concerning time and place.”[15] I will draw on Klein’s notion of assemblage to compare a painting to music and general culture, leading to a new understanding of the musical landscape in Rachmaninoff’s Prelude.
Kent Cleland uses a Bergsonian lens to analyze Schoenberg and Cage in “The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation,” positing that they had both studied Bergson, and were arguably influenced by his ideas in their respective compositional processes.[16] The most comprehensive Bergsonian study in music, however, is in Cleland’s doctoral dissertation, “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson,” which will serve as the point of departure for my discussion of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude.[17] In his dissertation, Cleland outlines a comprehensive Bergsonian method of musical analysis, demonstrating how Bergson’s ideas are latent in established analytical approaches to musical transformation, which he describes as “Continuity within change…” referencing Heinrich Koch, Carl Dahlhaus, and David Lewin. [18] Much of Cleland’s dissertation is an appraisal of methodologies in music theory that involve phenomenology and temporalism, and their relation to Bergson’s philosophy. After establishing a methodological basis for Bergsonian musical analysis, Cleland presents short examples of his approach from works by Bach, Moussorgsky, and Schoenberg.[19]
My study of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude will build on the above publications in pursuing a thorough investigation of one work and its relationship with broader issues in philosophy and painting. The result will be a deep theoretical engagement with the Prelude that establishes a new methodology for dealing with Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom in general.
Method
I will further consult primary and secondary sources for this study. Primary sources will include the video recording of Moiseiwitsch recalling his conversation with Rachmaninoff, Böcklin’s painting, an authoritative critical edition of the Prelude Op. 32 No. 10, Bergson’s two books, Time and Free Will, and Matter and Memory, letters, and correspondence from Rachmaninoff.[20] Secondary sources will include Bergsonian musical studies, described in the previous section.
Each analytical observation will involve specific passages in the Prelude pertinent to specific quotes from Bergson that illuminate the musical examples. These observations will be springboards for further discussions involving general culture (i.e. similar to Klein’s idea of territorial assemblage), and excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s writings. As an example, what follows is an analysis of musical material presented at the opening of the Prelude.
The opening of the Prelude establishes two antiphonal “choirs.” An upper, Choir A, built of chords playing dotted-rhythm triplets, and a lower, Choir B, of staccato chords that echo long, held chords of Choir A. Example 1 shows mm. 1-3 of the Prelude.
Example 1. Opening, mm. 1-3 of the Prelude, showing two antiphonal choirs.
Choir A establishes a lilting rhythm, built of dotted-rhythm triplets. When I play this passage, my muscle memory, or Bergsonian habit memory, activates, drawing connections to other works I have played with a similar rhythmic schema. Example 2 illustrates the openings of two such piano works.
Example 2a. Opening of Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major, K. 331, I. Andante grazioso by W.A. Mozart, (mm. 1-4)
Example 2b. Opening of Moment Musical D 780 (Op. 94) No. 2 in A-flat Major by Franz Schubert, (mm 1-3)
The dotted rhythmic gesture is also found in other works as well. I associate the rhythmic patterns seen in Example 2 with a pastoral quality, pictured in Böcklin’s painting. This familiar rhythm harkens back to the baroque Siciliana, a pastoral genre with many notable examples (perhaps this rhythmic pattern may not function as an icon). My habit memory of playing and listening to other works with the same pattern immediately builds a chain of referential associations for me, or in Bergson’s terms: “Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration.”[21] In Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom, the performer enters a space or landscape with infinite connections, interpreted differently by every performer. In their performances, Moiseiwitsch and Richter express the Prelude in their own unique way.
Circled in Example 3, the pizzicato, bell-like sonorities of Choir B, seen circled in Example 3, echo and punctuate the preceding chords in Choir A.
Example 3. Choir B (circled) at the opening of the Prelude (mm. 1-8).
Bergson describes an experience of hearing bells in Time and Free Will as an illustration of his concept of duration. The quote below offers an approach to interpreting how we might hear Choir B of the Prelude:
Perhaps some people count the successive strokes of a distant bell…but most people’s minds do not proceed in this way… I retain each of these successive sensation in order to combine it with the others and form a group which reminds me of an air or rhythm which I know: in that case I do not count the sounds, I limit myself to gathering, so to speak, the qualitative impression produced by the whole series.[22]
According to Bergson, I perceive Choir B as a qualitative whole within the context of Choir A. The sounds conjure up bells from a cathedral on a crowded city street. We not only hear the bells: we might hear and feel a breeze, conversations, car horns, etc. Similarly, the chords of Choir B live within the complex framework of the Prelude’s duration at the opening.
Further, when I separate Choir B from Choir A in a reduction, shown in Example 2 (the piano reductions shown in all of my examples will be my own), it reveals several points of interest.
Example 2. Reduction of Choir B at the opening of the Prelude, (MM. 1-8).
When I play this reduction, it takes on a plaintive, chorale-like quality. The chords gradually descend, and as the Roman Numerals indicate, the harmonies wind in and around themselves, so to speak. The falling 3rd, 4th, and 5th intervals in the lowest voice of the left hand part recalls the sound of recorded bells from a Russian Orthodox church in Novgorod.[23] During his childhood, Rachmaninoff repeatedly experienced the sights and the sounds of chiming church bells. Example 4 is a transcription of some of the motivic material played by the Novgorod bells heard in the recording.
Example 3. My transcription of motivic material played by bells in Novgorod in a recording
The motivic material in Example 3 has a similar, winding descent pattern to Choir B in the Prelude. The bell sounds in the recording contain a plethora of refracted overtones, which Rachmaninoff evokes in his piano idiom by writing large, modal chords. I find this circuitous descent, in Examples 2 and 3, to be similar to Bergsonian duration, because it creates an elongated, or suspended perception of time.[24] Many of Rachmaninoff’s original melodies, which were often chant-inspired, have a similar contour.[25]
To continue with my association of Choir B and bells, I quote from Rachmaninoff’s reminiscences, shared with Oskar Von Riesemann.
The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of the Russia I used to know–Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow. They accompanied every Russian from childhood to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence…All my life I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells…One of my fondest childhood recollections is associated with the four notes of the great bells in the St. Sophia Cathedral of Novgorod, which I often heard when my grandmother took me to town on church festival days…The four notes were a theme that recurred again and again, four silvery weeping notes, veiled in an everchanging accompaniment woven around them. I always associated the idea of tears with them.[26]
The notion of bells as an emotional signifier and childhood memory for Rachmaninoff adds depth when interpreting the B Minor Prelude. My description of the “everchanging accompaniment” depicts how I experience the bells sounds in the opening of the Prelude.[27]
Rachmaninoff’s personal description of bells in the quote above recalls Bergson’s concept of spontaneous memory and Proust’s “Madeleine Episode.” Bergson describes this kind of memory as follows: “Memories, which we believed abolished, then reappear with striking completeness; we live over again, in all their detail, forgotten scenes of childhood.”[28] So if we follow through with this chain of associations, we find that the opening of the B Minor Prelude contains many layers of possible meanings, which can be illuminated and spoken about using Bergson’s ideas.
Tentative Chapter Headings
Part I-Genesis
Chapter 1: A Prelude and a Painting (pp. 1-25)
A Conversation and a Painting-Moiseiwitsch’s interview, Böcklin’s painting, and the context of Rachmaninoff’s B Minor Prelude. (~8 pages).
Introduction to Henri Bergson-A brief discussion of Bergson’s philosophy of time and memory as it pertains to this study (~8 pages).
Bergsonian Musical Analysis-An overview of previous Bergsonian studies in music (~8 pages).
Part II-Musical Analysis
Chapter 2: A Haunting Exposition (pp. 25-50)
Large-Scale Form-A discussion of the Prelude’s overall form, referencing Rachmaninoff’s ideas on musical form and Bergson’s views of development (~5 pages).
An Initial Impulse-A thorough investigation of the germinal material of the Prelude (~5 pages).
Rhythm and Hypnosis-A discussion of the slow, lilting rhythm of this piece, which evokes hypnosis. An exploration of how Bergson and Rachmaninoff viewed hypnosis, and how their thoughts shed light on the rhythmic qualities of this piece (~5 pages).
Registral Spirals Part I-Registral spirals in the upper “choir” of the A section. The parallel chords of this section evokes Russian Orthodox Choral singing, which Rachmaninoff speaks about in his writings (~5 pages).
Bells-The lower “choir” of the A section punctuates the music in the upper part. This part seems as if it is for pizzicato strings, and evokes muted bells. Bells are a sonic icon in much of Rachmaninoff’s music. I will discuss challenges for the pianist in performing this unusual texture (~5 pages).
Chapter 3: Differing Culminations (pp. 50-75)
A False Culmination-Analysis of the B section, which builds in volume, texture, and register, towards a deceptive emotional outburst. This is deceptive because it is not the true apex of the piece (~8 pages).
A Frozen State-Analysis of the C section, which seems to freeze time (~8 pages).
A Culminating Oasis-A discussion of the true culmination of this Prelude; a metaphysical catharsis, without barlines or measured time (~8 pages).
Chapter 4: The Homecoming (pp. 75-100)
The Return-Analysis of the D section, or the recapitulation. As with the man in Böcklin’s painting, this section is like a return home, a return to the past in the form of Bergson’s Spontaneous Memory, yet nothing is the same (~12 pages).
An Underlying Gesture-A discussion of a tiny two-note motive, that is like an embryo of the entire Prelude (~12 pages).
Part III-Conclusions
Chapter 5: Rachmaninoff’s Concealed Innovations (pp. 100-115)
Rachmaninoff the Post-Modernist-An argument that Rachmaninoff’s musical temporalism is a unique approach to piano writing, and should not be discredited as anachronistic in the twentieth century (~15 pages).
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, (1896). Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness, (1889). Translated by F.L. Pogson. New York: Harper, 1960.
Böcklin, Arnold. Die Heimkehr, 1887, "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im
Jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998. upload December 2008, accessed November 11, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Böcklin_Die_Heimkehr_1887.jpg
Clip of Benno Moiseiwitsch speaking, from “The Art of Piano,” posted March 20,
2010, accessed November 11, 2016, https://youtu.be/iFobyhwznng.
Rachmaninoff letters and correspondence, translated by Galina Buxton. Online Archive of Rachmaninoff’s Letters and Correspondence in Russian, 2006-2016, Accessed November 11, 2016, http://senar.ru.
Secondary Sources
Cleland, Kent. “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson.” PhD. Dissertation, Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinatti. 2003. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1059403850
_____________“The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation.” The European Legacy: Toward new Paradigms. 16:7. 2011. Accessed November 11, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/272020443/Kent-Cleland-The-European-Legacy-Toward-New-Paradigms-The-Temporalist-Harp-Henri-Bergson-and-Twentieth-Century-Musical-Innovation
Copleston S.J., Frederick. “A History of Philosophy-Volume 9 Maine de Biran to Sartre Part I.” Image Books, a division of Doubleday & Company, Inc. New York. 1977.
Gunter, Pete A.Y. “Henri Bergson: A Bibliography Revised second edition.” Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://philpapers.org/rec/THEHBA.
Gunter, Pete A.Y. “A Tale of Two Memories: Bergson and the Creation of Memory Science.” Mind & Matter Volume 11(2). pp. 137–152. Imprint Academic, 2013.
Klein, Michael. "Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage." 19th-Century Music 31, no. 1. 2007. 028-52. doi:10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028. Accessed November 11, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028.
Megay, Joyce N. "La Question De L'Influence De Bergson Sur Proust." The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27, no. 2 (1973): 53-58. doi:10.2307/1346558. accessed November 11, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/1346558.
Pelletier, Vanessa Sylvie Amélie. “In the time of Bergson : the influence of the philosophical thoughts of Henri Bergson on the writings and music of Dane Rudhyar.” Carolina Digital Repository. 2010. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:60293f15-8035-49fa-a8c0-424adc34b68e.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way (1913), Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. iBook, accessed November 11, 2016. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swanns-way/id506043844?mt=11).
Salley, Keith. “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg.” Music Theory Online Volume 21 No. 4. December 2015. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.4/mto.15.21.4.salley.html.
Video of bells in Veliky (Great) Novgorod on Easter, August 20, 2014, published June 27, 2016, Accessed November 18, 2016, https://youtu.be/_zvfg1oGYbM.
[1] Clip of Benno Moiseiwitsch speaking, from “The Art of Piano,” posted January 26, 2009, accessed November 20, 2016, https://youtu.be/vpiMAaPTze8, 16:53–18:26. Additionally, Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, “Sergei Rachmaninoff A Lifetime in Music,” (1956), (reprinted in paperback in 2001 by Indiana University Press, by permission of New York University Press), 296, confirms the relationship between the painting and the Prelude.
[2] Arnold Böcklin, Die Heimkehr, 1887, "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998. upload December 2008, accessed November 11, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Böcklin_Die_Heimkehr_1887.jpg.
[3] Online Archive of Rachmaninoff’s Letters and Correspondence in Russian, 2006-2016, Accessed November 11, 2016, http://senar.ru.
[4] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (1889), Translated by F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper, 1960).
[5] Ibid., 103-104
[6] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978).
[7] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913), Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, (iBook, accessed November 11, 2016, https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swanns-way/id506043844?mt=11).
[8] Ibid., 129-131.
[9] Joyce N. Megay, "La Question De L'Influence De Bergson Sur Proust," The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27, no. 2 (1973): 53-58, doi:10.2307/1346558, accessed November 11, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/1346558.
[10] Contemporary memory science was influenced by Bergson’s philosophy of memory. For further reference, refer to: Pete A.Y. Gunter, “A Tale of Two Memories: Bergson and the Creation of Memory Science,” Mind & Matter Volume 11(2), pp. 137–152, Imprint Academic, 2013. I am grateful to know and work with Dr. Gunter, and for his influence on this study.
[11] Numerous articles can be found in Dr. Pete A.Y. Gunter’s “Online Bergson Bibliography, Second Addition,” recently published online by the Presses Universitaires de France. This builds on Gunter’s earlier edition: “Henri Bergson: A Bibliography Revised second edition,” P. A. Y. Gunter, (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986), Accessed November 11, 2016, http://philpapers.org/rec/THEHBA.
[12] Keith Salley, “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg,” Music Theory Online Volume 21 No. 4, (December 2015), accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.4/mto.15.21.4.salley.html
[13] Vanessa Sylvie Amélie Pelletier, “In the time of Bergson : the influence of the philosophical thoughts of Henri Bergson on the writings and music of Dane Rudhyar,” Carolina Digital Repository, (2010), accessed November 11, 2016, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:60293f15-8035-49fa-a8c0-424adc34b68e.
[14] Michael Klein, "Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage," 19th-Century Music 31, no. 1 (2007): 028-52. doi:10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028, accessed November 11, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028.
[15] Ibid., 52.
[16] Kent Cleland, “The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation,” The European Legacy: Toward new Paradigms, 16:7, 953-967, accessed November 11, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/272020443/Kent-Cleland-The-European-Legacy-Toward-New-Paradigms-The-Temporalist-Harp-Henri-Bergson-and-Twentieth-Century-Musical-Innovation
[17] Kent Cleland, “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson,” PhD. Dissertation, Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinatti, (2003), Accessed November 11, 2016, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1059403850
[18] Ibid., 10.
[19] Specifically, J. S. Bach's C-sharp Minor Fugue from The Well Tempered Clavier Book I, Modest Moussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov, and Arnold Schoenberg's Variations on a Recitative, Op. 40.
[20] Rachmaninoff’s letters will be translated by my mother, who emigrated from the Soviet Union and is a native Russian speaker
[21] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978), 73.
[22] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (1889), Translated by F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper, 1960), 86.
[23] Video of bells in Veliky (Great) Novgorod on Easter, August 20, 2014, published June 27, 2016, Accessed November 18, 2016, https://youtu.be/_zvfg1oGYbM.
[24] My mother, who emigrated from the Soviet Union, associates Rachmaninoff’s melodies with the seemingly endless meadows and prairies outside of Moscow. Her association illustrates one way Rachmaninoff’s long melodic lines can influence a listener.
[25] Notably, Rachmaninoff became obsessed with the famous Dies Irae chant motif later in his life, and included it in a number of his works. The Dies Irae has a similar melodic contour to Example 2.
[26] Quoted in Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, “Sergei Rachmaninoff A Lifetime in Music,” (1956), (reprinted in paperback in 2001 by Indiana University Press, by permission of New York University Press), 184. Rachmaninoff dictated his reminiscences to Oskar Von Riesemann, who published a book in 1934. These are probably not Rachmaninoff’s exact words, as Riesemann almost certainly embellished and added to the text. Nevertheless, Rachmaninoff approved of Riesemann’s book, and I find that some of these reminiscences illustrate aspects of Rachmaninoff’s music, such as bells in this case, in a meaningful way.
[27] Bells were a significant theme for Rachmaninoff, contributing to his own unique visual and aural landscape in his music. His choral symphony, The Bells Op. 35 (1913), with Edgar Allen Poe’s text translated into Russian by Konstantin Balmont, is perhaps the most overt example of Rachmaninoff’s obsession with bells.
[28] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978), 154.
In a filmed interview, the pianist Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890–1963) revealed that Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873–1943) Prelude in B Minor Op. 32 No. 10 (1910) was inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s (1827-1901) painting, Die Heimkehr (The Homecoming, 1887).[1] See Example 1.
Example 1. Die Heimkehr (1887) by Arnold Böcklin[2]
Böcklin’s painting depicts a man returning home, apparently overcome with a flood of memories. The mood of Die Heimkehr resonates with Rachmaninoff’s own nostalgia for the Russia of his youth, which he expressed in his letters and correspondence.[3] The philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) developed a vocabulary that proves useful in a systematic study of the subjective experience of memory depicted in Die Heimkehr and the Prelude. I will draw from two works by Bergson in this study, Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896) to frame my musical analyses.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson distinguishes time from space, explaining that a spatial representation, utilized in a clock, cannot fully account for an individual’s rich perception of time. [4] Bergson calls his vision of experiential time durée (duration). Consider the familiar phrase “Time flies when you are having fun,” where the emphasis is on the quality of time perception. Bergson frequently uses music as a metaphor to explain his philosophical concepts, perhaps due in part to the influence of his father, Michał Bergson (1820–1898), a composer and pianist who studied with Chopin. To further illustrate duration, Bergson states “Like the successive notes of a tune by which we allow ourselves to be lulled and soothed…pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another.”[5] The notion of tones “melting” into one another, exhibiting a fundamental continuity in duration, will figure prominently in my musical analysis of time perception in the B Minor Prelude.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson emphasizes the important role that memory plays in the experience of duration.[6] He posits that there are two general forms of memory, habit memory and spontaneous memory. Habit memory describes motor actions, involved in such mundane habits as brushing our teeth or driving a car. By way of analogy, it’s this type of memory that musicians refer to as muscle memory.
The second form of memory, spontaneous memory, is more elusive. Spontaneous memories are triggered by an external stimulus, such as a sound or image that reminds us of intimate personal experiences with a highly emotional component. Thus, spontaneous memory resembles “involuntary memory,” a term that was frequently used by the novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), who was thoroughly familiar with Bergson’s ideas. In the famous “Episode of the Madeleine” from Swann’s Way (1913) the narrator eats a madeleine cookie dipped in tea, and is immediately overtaken by remembrances of his childhood.[7] In the passage below, Proust describes an experience of this type of memory.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.…But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.[8]
Interestingly, Proust may have been directly influenced by Bergson’s concept of spontaneous memory because they were cousins by marriage, and often met for discussions.[9] I will argue that Bergson’s second notion of memory resonates with the aesthetics of the Prelude.
In this study, I will use Bergson’s concepts of duration and spontaneous (now termed episodic) memory as a lens with which to explore how musical material in the Prelude turns back on itself in recurring remembrances of its past, in a process that mirrors themes from Die Heimkehr and Rachmaninoff’s writings.[10] My musical analyses will draw from Schillinger, Schenker, and Roman numeral analysis, aiming to illustrate the unique temporalism of Rachmaninoff’s musical language in the B Minor Prelude. The result will be to demonstrate Rachmaninoff’s unique approach to piano writing, which frequently has been discredited as anachronistic. Hopefully, this study will suggest a new methodology with which to explore the concealed innovations in Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom.
Significance and State of Research
Bergson’s notions of duration and spontaneous memory resonate with the arts, exemplified by a number of Bergsonian studies in film and literature, as well as a small but significant body of Bergsonian studies in music.[11] In his article “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg,” Keith Salley analyzes Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, from a Bergsonian perspective.[12] Salley first demonstrates that Schoenberg owned a copy of Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) and took extensive notes in the margins. He then speculates that Bergson’s ideas may have influenced Schoenberg’s compositional process in the Op. 19 piano pieces. Whether or not Schoenberg was directly influenced by Bergson, Salley argues that Bergson’s concept of duration resembles Schoenberg’s approach to developing variation. Another informative foray into Bergson’s ideas in relation to music is explored by Vanessa Sylvie Amélie Pelletier, in her Master’s Thesis “In the Time of Bergson: The Influence of the Philosophical Thoughts of Henri Bergson on the Writings and Music of Dane Rudhyar,” points out that the American mystical composer Dane Rudhyar’s musical style was directly influenced by Bergson’s philosophy, and that Bergsonian analysis uncovers metaphysical meanings in Rudhyar’s music.[13] Both Salley and Pelletier begin their articles by establishing connections between Bergson and either Schoenberg or Rudhyar. It is not my intention to continue this line of inquiry since there is no direct evidence to suggest such a connection with Rachmaninoff. Nonetheless, as I hope to demonstrate, in the parallelism between Böcklin’s painting and Rachmaninoff Prelude, Bergson’s ideas form the common denominator.
Michael Klein, in his article “L’Isle joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage” finds cultural resonances between Bergson, Debussy, and Watteau.[14] His study examines the possible connection between Antoine Watteau’s painting, Le Pèlerinage à L’Isle Cithère (1717), and Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse (1904). Klein’s analysis derives from the concept “assemblage,” used by Deleuze and Guattari, which he defines as “a multiplicity that territorializes natural, cultural, biological, and artistic phenomena…concerning time and place.”[15] I will draw on Klein’s notion of assemblage to compare a painting to music and general culture, leading to a new understanding of the musical landscape in Rachmaninoff’s Prelude.
Kent Cleland uses a Bergsonian lens to analyze Schoenberg and Cage in “The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation,” positing that they had both studied Bergson, and were arguably influenced by his ideas in their respective compositional processes.[16] The most comprehensive Bergsonian study in music, however, is in Cleland’s doctoral dissertation, “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson,” which will serve as the point of departure for my discussion of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude.[17] In his dissertation, Cleland outlines a comprehensive Bergsonian method of musical analysis, demonstrating how Bergson’s ideas are latent in established analytical approaches to musical transformation, which he describes as “Continuity within change…” referencing Heinrich Koch, Carl Dahlhaus, and David Lewin. [18] Much of Cleland’s dissertation is an appraisal of methodologies in music theory that involve phenomenology and temporalism, and their relation to Bergson’s philosophy. After establishing a methodological basis for Bergsonian musical analysis, Cleland presents short examples of his approach from works by Bach, Moussorgsky, and Schoenberg.[19]
My study of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude will build on the above publications in pursuing a thorough investigation of one work and its relationship with broader issues in philosophy and painting. The result will be a deep theoretical engagement with the Prelude that establishes a new methodology for dealing with Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom in general.
Method
I will further consult primary and secondary sources for this study. Primary sources will include the video recording of Moiseiwitsch recalling his conversation with Rachmaninoff, Böcklin’s painting, an authoritative critical edition of the Prelude Op. 32 No. 10, Bergson’s two books, Time and Free Will, and Matter and Memory, letters, and correspondence from Rachmaninoff.[20] Secondary sources will include Bergsonian musical studies, described in the previous section.
Each analytical observation will involve specific passages in the Prelude pertinent to specific quotes from Bergson that illuminate the musical examples. These observations will be springboards for further discussions involving general culture (i.e. similar to Klein’s idea of territorial assemblage), and excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s writings. As an example, what follows is an analysis of musical material presented at the opening of the Prelude.
The opening of the Prelude establishes two antiphonal “choirs.” An upper, Choir A, built of chords playing dotted-rhythm triplets, and a lower, Choir B, of staccato chords that echo long, held chords of Choir A. Example 1 shows mm. 1-3 of the Prelude.
Example 1. Opening, mm. 1-3 of the Prelude, showing two antiphonal choirs.
Choir A establishes a lilting rhythm, built of dotted-rhythm triplets. When I play this passage, my muscle memory, or Bergsonian habit memory, activates, drawing connections to other works I have played with a similar rhythmic schema. Example 2 illustrates the openings of two such piano works.
Example 2a. Opening of Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major, K. 331, I. Andante grazioso by W.A. Mozart, (mm. 1-4)
Example 2b. Opening of Moment Musical D 780 (Op. 94) No. 2 in A-flat Major by Franz Schubert, (mm 1-3)
The dotted rhythmic gesture is also found in other works as well. I associate the rhythmic patterns seen in Example 2 with a pastoral quality, pictured in Böcklin’s painting. This familiar rhythm harkens back to the baroque Siciliana, a pastoral genre with many notable examples (perhaps this rhythmic pattern may not function as an icon). My habit memory of playing and listening to other works with the same pattern immediately builds a chain of referential associations for me, or in Bergson’s terms: “Memory, inseparable in practice from perception, imports the past into the present, contracts into a single intuition many moments of duration.”[21] In Rachmaninoff’s piano idiom, the performer enters a space or landscape with infinite connections, interpreted differently by every performer. In their performances, Moiseiwitsch and Richter express the Prelude in their own unique way.
Circled in Example 3, the pizzicato, bell-like sonorities of Choir B, seen circled in Example 3, echo and punctuate the preceding chords in Choir A.
Example 3. Choir B (circled) at the opening of the Prelude (mm. 1-8).
Bergson describes an experience of hearing bells in Time and Free Will as an illustration of his concept of duration. The quote below offers an approach to interpreting how we might hear Choir B of the Prelude:
Perhaps some people count the successive strokes of a distant bell…but most people’s minds do not proceed in this way… I retain each of these successive sensation in order to combine it with the others and form a group which reminds me of an air or rhythm which I know: in that case I do not count the sounds, I limit myself to gathering, so to speak, the qualitative impression produced by the whole series.[22]
According to Bergson, I perceive Choir B as a qualitative whole within the context of Choir A. The sounds conjure up bells from a cathedral on a crowded city street. We not only hear the bells: we might hear and feel a breeze, conversations, car horns, etc. Similarly, the chords of Choir B live within the complex framework of the Prelude’s duration at the opening.
Further, when I separate Choir B from Choir A in a reduction, shown in Example 2 (the piano reductions shown in all of my examples will be my own), it reveals several points of interest.
Example 2. Reduction of Choir B at the opening of the Prelude, (MM. 1-8).
When I play this reduction, it takes on a plaintive, chorale-like quality. The chords gradually descend, and as the Roman Numerals indicate, the harmonies wind in and around themselves, so to speak. The falling 3rd, 4th, and 5th intervals in the lowest voice of the left hand part recalls the sound of recorded bells from a Russian Orthodox church in Novgorod.[23] During his childhood, Rachmaninoff repeatedly experienced the sights and the sounds of chiming church bells. Example 4 is a transcription of some of the motivic material played by the Novgorod bells heard in the recording.
Example 3. My transcription of motivic material played by bells in Novgorod in a recording
The motivic material in Example 3 has a similar, winding descent pattern to Choir B in the Prelude. The bell sounds in the recording contain a plethora of refracted overtones, which Rachmaninoff evokes in his piano idiom by writing large, modal chords. I find this circuitous descent, in Examples 2 and 3, to be similar to Bergsonian duration, because it creates an elongated, or suspended perception of time.[24] Many of Rachmaninoff’s original melodies, which were often chant-inspired, have a similar contour.[25]
To continue with my association of Choir B and bells, I quote from Rachmaninoff’s reminiscences, shared with Oskar Von Riesemann.
The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of the Russia I used to know–Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow. They accompanied every Russian from childhood to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence…All my life I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells…One of my fondest childhood recollections is associated with the four notes of the great bells in the St. Sophia Cathedral of Novgorod, which I often heard when my grandmother took me to town on church festival days…The four notes were a theme that recurred again and again, four silvery weeping notes, veiled in an everchanging accompaniment woven around them. I always associated the idea of tears with them.[26]
The notion of bells as an emotional signifier and childhood memory for Rachmaninoff adds depth when interpreting the B Minor Prelude. My description of the “everchanging accompaniment” depicts how I experience the bells sounds in the opening of the Prelude.[27]
Rachmaninoff’s personal description of bells in the quote above recalls Bergson’s concept of spontaneous memory and Proust’s “Madeleine Episode.” Bergson describes this kind of memory as follows: “Memories, which we believed abolished, then reappear with striking completeness; we live over again, in all their detail, forgotten scenes of childhood.”[28] So if we follow through with this chain of associations, we find that the opening of the B Minor Prelude contains many layers of possible meanings, which can be illuminated and spoken about using Bergson’s ideas.
Tentative Chapter Headings
Part I-Genesis
Chapter 1: A Prelude and a Painting (pp. 1-25)
A Conversation and a Painting-Moiseiwitsch’s interview, Böcklin’s painting, and the context of Rachmaninoff’s B Minor Prelude. (~8 pages).
Introduction to Henri Bergson-A brief discussion of Bergson’s philosophy of time and memory as it pertains to this study (~8 pages).
Bergsonian Musical Analysis-An overview of previous Bergsonian studies in music (~8 pages).
Part II-Musical Analysis
Chapter 2: A Haunting Exposition (pp. 25-50)
Large-Scale Form-A discussion of the Prelude’s overall form, referencing Rachmaninoff’s ideas on musical form and Bergson’s views of development (~5 pages).
An Initial Impulse-A thorough investigation of the germinal material of the Prelude (~5 pages).
Rhythm and Hypnosis-A discussion of the slow, lilting rhythm of this piece, which evokes hypnosis. An exploration of how Bergson and Rachmaninoff viewed hypnosis, and how their thoughts shed light on the rhythmic qualities of this piece (~5 pages).
Registral Spirals Part I-Registral spirals in the upper “choir” of the A section. The parallel chords of this section evokes Russian Orthodox Choral singing, which Rachmaninoff speaks about in his writings (~5 pages).
Bells-The lower “choir” of the A section punctuates the music in the upper part. This part seems as if it is for pizzicato strings, and evokes muted bells. Bells are a sonic icon in much of Rachmaninoff’s music. I will discuss challenges for the pianist in performing this unusual texture (~5 pages).
Chapter 3: Differing Culminations (pp. 50-75)
A False Culmination-Analysis of the B section, which builds in volume, texture, and register, towards a deceptive emotional outburst. This is deceptive because it is not the true apex of the piece (~8 pages).
A Frozen State-Analysis of the C section, which seems to freeze time (~8 pages).
A Culminating Oasis-A discussion of the true culmination of this Prelude; a metaphysical catharsis, without barlines or measured time (~8 pages).
Chapter 4: The Homecoming (pp. 75-100)
The Return-Analysis of the D section, or the recapitulation. As with the man in Böcklin’s painting, this section is like a return home, a return to the past in the form of Bergson’s Spontaneous Memory, yet nothing is the same (~12 pages).
An Underlying Gesture-A discussion of a tiny two-note motive, that is like an embryo of the entire Prelude (~12 pages).
Part III-Conclusions
Chapter 5: Rachmaninoff’s Concealed Innovations (pp. 100-115)
Rachmaninoff the Post-Modernist-An argument that Rachmaninoff’s musical temporalism is a unique approach to piano writing, and should not be discredited as anachronistic in the twentieth century (~15 pages).
Select Bibliography
Primary Sources
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory, (1896). Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness, (1889). Translated by F.L. Pogson. New York: Harper, 1960.
Böcklin, Arnold. Die Heimkehr, 1887, "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im
Jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998. upload December 2008, accessed November 11, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Böcklin_Die_Heimkehr_1887.jpg
Clip of Benno Moiseiwitsch speaking, from “The Art of Piano,” posted March 20,
2010, accessed November 11, 2016, https://youtu.be/iFobyhwznng.
Rachmaninoff letters and correspondence, translated by Galina Buxton. Online Archive of Rachmaninoff’s Letters and Correspondence in Russian, 2006-2016, Accessed November 11, 2016, http://senar.ru.
Secondary Sources
Cleland, Kent. “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson.” PhD. Dissertation, Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinatti. 2003. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1059403850
_____________“The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation.” The European Legacy: Toward new Paradigms. 16:7. 2011. Accessed November 11, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/272020443/Kent-Cleland-The-European-Legacy-Toward-New-Paradigms-The-Temporalist-Harp-Henri-Bergson-and-Twentieth-Century-Musical-Innovation
Copleston S.J., Frederick. “A History of Philosophy-Volume 9 Maine de Biran to Sartre Part I.” Image Books, a division of Doubleday & Company, Inc. New York. 1977.
Gunter, Pete A.Y. “Henri Bergson: A Bibliography Revised second edition.” Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://philpapers.org/rec/THEHBA.
Gunter, Pete A.Y. “A Tale of Two Memories: Bergson and the Creation of Memory Science.” Mind & Matter Volume 11(2). pp. 137–152. Imprint Academic, 2013.
Klein, Michael. "Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage." 19th-Century Music 31, no. 1. 2007. 028-52. doi:10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028. Accessed November 11, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028.
Megay, Joyce N. "La Question De L'Influence De Bergson Sur Proust." The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27, no. 2 (1973): 53-58. doi:10.2307/1346558. accessed November 11, 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/1346558.
Pelletier, Vanessa Sylvie Amélie. “In the time of Bergson : the influence of the philosophical thoughts of Henri Bergson on the writings and music of Dane Rudhyar.” Carolina Digital Repository. 2010. Accessed November 11, 2016. https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:60293f15-8035-49fa-a8c0-424adc34b68e.
Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way (1913), Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. iBook, accessed November 11, 2016. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swanns-way/id506043844?mt=11).
Salley, Keith. “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg.” Music Theory Online Volume 21 No. 4. December 2015. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.4/mto.15.21.4.salley.html.
Video of bells in Veliky (Great) Novgorod on Easter, August 20, 2014, published June 27, 2016, Accessed November 18, 2016, https://youtu.be/_zvfg1oGYbM.
[1] Clip of Benno Moiseiwitsch speaking, from “The Art of Piano,” posted January 26, 2009, accessed November 20, 2016, https://youtu.be/vpiMAaPTze8, 16:53–18:26. Additionally, Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, “Sergei Rachmaninoff A Lifetime in Music,” (1956), (reprinted in paperback in 2001 by Indiana University Press, by permission of New York University Press), 296, confirms the relationship between the painting and the Prelude.
[2] Arnold Böcklin, Die Heimkehr, 1887, "Von Anker bis Zünd, Die Kunst im jungen Bundesstaat 1848 - 1900", Kunsthaus Zürich, 1998. upload December 2008, accessed November 11, 2016, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Böcklin_Die_Heimkehr_1887.jpg.
[3] Online Archive of Rachmaninoff’s Letters and Correspondence in Russian, 2006-2016, Accessed November 11, 2016, http://senar.ru.
[4] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (1889), Translated by F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper, 1960).
[5] Ibid., 103-104
[6] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978).
[7] Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913), Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, (iBook, accessed November 11, 2016, https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swanns-way/id506043844?mt=11).
[8] Ibid., 129-131.
[9] Joyce N. Megay, "La Question De L'Influence De Bergson Sur Proust," The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 27, no. 2 (1973): 53-58, doi:10.2307/1346558, accessed November 11, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/1346558.
[10] Contemporary memory science was influenced by Bergson’s philosophy of memory. For further reference, refer to: Pete A.Y. Gunter, “A Tale of Two Memories: Bergson and the Creation of Memory Science,” Mind & Matter Volume 11(2), pp. 137–152, Imprint Academic, 2013. I am grateful to know and work with Dr. Gunter, and for his influence on this study.
[11] Numerous articles can be found in Dr. Pete A.Y. Gunter’s “Online Bergson Bibliography, Second Addition,” recently published online by the Presses Universitaires de France. This builds on Gunter’s earlier edition: “Henri Bergson: A Bibliography Revised second edition,” P. A. Y. Gunter, (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University, Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986), Accessed November 11, 2016, http://philpapers.org/rec/THEHBA.
[12] Keith Salley, “On Duration and Developing Variation: The Intersecting Ideologies of Henri Bergson and Arnold Schoenberg,” Music Theory Online Volume 21 No. 4, (December 2015), accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.4/mto.15.21.4.salley.html
[13] Vanessa Sylvie Amélie Pelletier, “In the time of Bergson : the influence of the philosophical thoughts of Henri Bergson on the writings and music of Dane Rudhyar,” Carolina Digital Repository, (2010), accessed November 11, 2016, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:60293f15-8035-49fa-a8c0-424adc34b68e.
[14] Michael Klein, "Debussy's L'Isle Joyeuse as Territorial Assemblage," 19th-Century Music 31, no. 1 (2007): 028-52. doi:10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028, accessed November 11, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncm.2007.31.1.028.
[15] Ibid., 52.
[16] Kent Cleland, “The Temporalist Harp: Henri Bergson and Twentieth-Century Musical Innovation,” The European Legacy: Toward new Paradigms, 16:7, 953-967, accessed November 11, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/272020443/Kent-Cleland-The-European-Legacy-Toward-New-Paradigms-The-Temporalist-Harp-Henri-Bergson-and-Twentieth-Century-Musical-Innovation
[17] Kent Cleland, “Musical Transformation as a Manifestation of the Temporal Process Philosophies of Henri Bergson,” PhD. Dissertation, Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinatti, (2003), Accessed November 11, 2016, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:ucin1059403850
[18] Ibid., 10.
[19] Specifically, J. S. Bach's C-sharp Minor Fugue from The Well Tempered Clavier Book I, Modest Moussorgsky's opera Boris Godunov, and Arnold Schoenberg's Variations on a Recitative, Op. 40.
[20] Rachmaninoff’s letters will be translated by my mother, who emigrated from the Soviet Union and is a native Russian speaker
[21] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978), 73.
[22] Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (1889), Translated by F.L. Pogson (New York: Harper, 1960), 86.
[23] Video of bells in Veliky (Great) Novgorod on Easter, August 20, 2014, published June 27, 2016, Accessed November 18, 2016, https://youtu.be/_zvfg1oGYbM.
[24] My mother, who emigrated from the Soviet Union, associates Rachmaninoff’s melodies with the seemingly endless meadows and prairies outside of Moscow. Her association illustrates one way Rachmaninoff’s long melodic lines can influence a listener.
[25] Notably, Rachmaninoff became obsessed with the famous Dies Irae chant motif later in his life, and included it in a number of his works. The Dies Irae has a similar melodic contour to Example 2.
[26] Quoted in Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, “Sergei Rachmaninoff A Lifetime in Music,” (1956), (reprinted in paperback in 2001 by Indiana University Press, by permission of New York University Press), 184. Rachmaninoff dictated his reminiscences to Oskar Von Riesemann, who published a book in 1934. These are probably not Rachmaninoff’s exact words, as Riesemann almost certainly embellished and added to the text. Nevertheless, Rachmaninoff approved of Riesemann’s book, and I find that some of these reminiscences illustrate aspects of Rachmaninoff’s music, such as bells in this case, in a meaningful way.
[27] Bells were a significant theme for Rachmaninoff, contributing to his own unique visual and aural landscape in his music. His choral symphony, The Bells Op. 35 (1913), with Edgar Allen Poe’s text translated into Russian by Konstantin Balmont, is perhaps the most overt example of Rachmaninoff’s obsession with bells.
[28] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), Translated by Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprint, New York: Humanities Press, 1978), 154.
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