Geez, my memory is really starting to give out. Before I dug out this CD, I was already preparing a post about how I came to Webern in the late eighties via the unusual recommendations of Frank Zappa and the reference to him in Gravity's Rainbow
That's not where my memory failed. As far as I, or anyone can tell, that is a reasonably accurate account of what led me to buy my first Webern CD (I mean, maybe I'm failing to mention the Observer feature on coffee table albums for the intellectual poseur — but you'll never prove that). No, what pulled me up short was when I pulled the CD off the shelf. It wasn't the one I was expecting. It wasn't my first Webern CD; it was my second. I didn't know I had a second Webern CD. I have no record of when I got it, though the Farringdon's price label on the cover suggests it was sometime 2004-2007 (Farringdon's is the Barbican's in-house shop). I have to confess I have no recollection of ever having listened to it.
But it doesn't end there. I started to have a gnawing feeling about that other Webern CD. Sure enough, Google found it for me on Music Arcades — and with the full exposition of all the notes I'd made for this CD. Turns out I needn't have copy-typed that paragraph, as 21 months ago I found the whole thing is already online. Mind you, I have dug a little further this time, via the Gravity's Rainbow Companion
Webern was shot on the evening of September 15, 1945, in the Austrian village of Mittersill… Webern's brother was under investigation for dealing in illegal substances. That night, a contingent of Allied soldiers approached the house in Mittersill; at the same moment Webern stepped out on his brother's patio to light a cigar. A jumpy American boy from North Carolina was startled by the light and shot Webern once with a .45 caliber pistol.
I wonder what happened to that jumpy American boy, whether he's still alive, how he came to terms with his mistake, and how many times he had to explain to others who Webern was.
I get along better with this album than I did with Webern's lieder, but I'm still a long way from getting it. The sleeve notes explain,
The bounds of tonality (principally D minor and, in the central section [of the Passacaglia], D major) are observed but even in the theme the A flat departs from the D minor scale in a way which has consequences throughout the work. This masterly composition serves to illustrate Webern's words: "The first principle for the presentation of a musical idea is comprehensibility".
Gotcha! I think I've heard too many of the Europeans that came after the Last Europea (and a few of the young barbarians too) who took it for granted that, in Pynchon's words, "all notes were truly equal at last". So the moment this equality was attained holds less potency than it once did. One of the Movements for String Orchestra sounds like Bernard Herrman to me!
Anyway, it makes me realise how many of my memories are not representations of original events, but just the trace of previous acts of recollection. That which was recalled remains, but the act of recalling kind of erases itself. I'd like to think this was a new departure in the theory of memory, but I've got a gnawing feeling I read something similar in some research into the witness recall in the psychology of criminal evidence.
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