JAVS Fall 2020

Exoticism depicting the Orient was at its height between 1889 and the end of World War I, a direct consequence of colonialist cultural appropriation espoused by the French and British Empires. In eighteenth and nineteenth century opera, depictions of the Orient were largely fictitious and caricatured. By the twentieth century portrayals of the oriental and the exotic in music were more nuanced, some merely imaginary, while others were rooted in the authentic music of ethnic groups performing in Paris’s Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900. Debussy attended both fairs, becoming fascinated by the music of Vietnam and Indonesia. Clarke attended the exposition of 1900 with her father, and Bloch was studying in Paris around the same time. For composers like Bloch, Clarke and Hindemith, the option to incorporate exotic influences in their music was a creative escape—a liberation from the confines of the Germanic school in which all had been trained, and which all needed to evolve beyond in the cultural aftermath of the War. While today, composers would be sensitive to the idea of cultural appropriation, cultural borrowings of this nature were viewed differently one hundred years ago. The stylized depiction of Chinese, Hebraic, Indonesian or Russian musical ideas was not derogatory in the mind of our composers. It was a creative feature that suggested modernity, whimsy, innovation, an international cultural outlook, and musical transformation to our composers. Above all, when examining the chief musical features of the 1919 viola works, one is struck by how inventive the composers were, and how broad the scope of their musical imagination. Hindemith was inspired to write the Sonata for Viola and Piano Op. 11, No. 4 after a cathartic experience playing Debussy’s String Quartet Op. 10 at the end of the war. In his own words: of our regiment a means of forgetting the hated military service. He was a great friend of music and a connoisseur and admirer of French culture. Small wonder then, that his most burning desire was to hear Debussy’s string quartet. We practiced the piece and played it for him with great emotion at a private concert. Just as we had finished the slow movement the radio officer entered the room, visibly shaken, and reported that the news of Debussy’s death had just come over the radio. We didn’t finish As a soldier in the First World War I was a member of a string quartet, which represented for the colonel

the performance. It was as if the breath of life had been taken from our playing. But we realized for the first time that music is more than style, technique, and the expression of personal feeling. Here, music transcended political boundaries, national hatred and the horrors of war. At no other time have I ever comprehended so completely in what direction music must develop. 9 The performance of French music was banned in Germany during the war, and the idea that an army colonel should have chosen to hear it would have come across not only as deeply unpatriotic but also in fact, as subversive. Hindemith’s newly discovered conviction regarding the direction music must take in the post-war period signifies the impossibility of adhering any longer to Germanic musical values above all others. His choice to profile French and exotic influences in the viola sonata implies separation from his musical upbringing. As Joel Haney puts it: “The alliance with Debussy’s music may be interpreted in terms of a postwar internationalist outlook through which Hindemith sought identification with a broader human community as well as distance from a cultural legacy tainted by wartime chauvinism.” 10 While most violists are quite aware of Debussy’s influence on the Op. 11/4 Sonata, many fewer listeners know the work contains numerous Russian influences. (Hindemith avidly consumed and promoted new music, premiering works by Bartók, and seeking to own scores for his personal music library of works by Stravinsky, Borodin, Glazunov, Glière, Sokolov, Taneyev, and Akimenko by 1919.) As early as 1925 Franz Willms noted the “Slavic style” in the sonata, while Haney’s research connects the opening melody of the second movement to material from Mussorgsky’s opera, Boris Godunov . Hindemith’s incorporation of “fluid modal pivoting between the related centers of G-flat major and E-flat minor, its frequent note repetition, shifts between duple and triple meter, and five bar phrasing” are all non-Germanic elements that allowed him greater expressive freedom. 11 His choice to write the sonata in three interconnected movements played without pause is a further departure from tradition. What anchors his exploration formally though, is the use of variation form to scaffold the second and third movements. This allows him to explore textures ranging from the capricious balletic leaps of variation 2 to more expressionistic grotesque distortion in variation

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 2, Fall 2020

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