Abstract
I draw upon Edmund Husserl’s classic text, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), in order to reframe some of his insight regarding the structures of inner time-consciousness and lay the groundwork for a few claims of my own. First, I show how musical expression is constituted in relation to the flowing movement of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, by carefully distinguishing between retention and recollection, I clarify, on the one hand, music’s ability to support access to memory proper (i.e. memory as a representation of the past) and, on the other hand, its ability to keep the past “in play,” so to speak (i.e. as an experience of nostalgia—as a perception of the past in terms of protentions that pertain to the present). In this way, we come to understand how music offers a unique memorial capacity—it makes possible the life of the past, as the vital movement of absolute subjectivity. Throughout the essay, I refer to Josquin’s motet Ave Maria…virgo serena in order to clarify the specific temporal structures that are at issue.
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Notes
With some misgivings, I provide the reader with modern transcriptions of a few key passages from the motet. (The misgivings have to do with the way that notation tends to present music as if it were an object.) These notated examples are intended simply to point the reader to the relevant passage of music as performed. Therefore, assuming that the reader will be listening to the music rather than following with a written score, I use quotations from Josquin’s text, rather than measure numbers, to locate specific passages within the motet. I suggest that the reader listen, for example, to the classic recording by The Hilliard Ensemble (Desprez 1984).
Joshua Rifkin points out that, although striking, this texture is not without historical precedent (2003, pp. 259–262). In “Munich, Milan, and a Marian Motet: Dating Josquin’s Ave Maria…virgo serena,” he shows that it is characteristic of elevation motets (i.e. motets performed during the elevation of the Host) associated with the Milanese style of the late 15th century, notably those of Loyset Compère and Gaspar van Weerbeke.
Phrase elision is a technique in which a new phrase begins before the previous phrase has concluded. It has the effect of generating a sense of movement (as opposed to a full cadence, which creates a sense of completion).
Unfortunately, to take into account the Bernau Manuscripts of 1917/18 would exceed the scope of this article. Please consult Rudolf Bernet (2010), Nicolas de Warren (2009), Lanei Rodemeyer (2006) and Toine Kortooms (2002) for works that read Husserl’s investigations in the Bernau Manucripts together with Husserliana X.
This is certainly not to imply that retention could be understood as any kind of spatial extent; I rather prefer to characterize it as ordinal: in the third is nested a second, and in the second, a first. Husserl writes: “In the steady progression of the running-off modes we then find the remarkable circumstance that each later running-off phase is itself a continuity, a continuity that constantly expands, a continuity of pasts. To the continuity of running-off modes of the object’s duration, we contrast the continuity of running-off modes belonging to each point of the duration. This second continuity is obviously included in the first, the continuity of running-off modes of the object’s duration. The running-off continuity of an enduring object is therefore a continuum whose phases are the continua of the running-off modes belonging to the different time-points of the duration of the object” (Husserl 1991/1966, p. 30/28).
I have in mind here Aristotle’s definition of time as “the number of movement with respect to before-and-afterness [ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως κατὰ τὸ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον]” (1957, Physics IV.11 219b 2–3, translation modified).
In mereological terms, this “duration” is an extensional whole. It is not additive; it does not get larger and larger, as in the old men of Proust’s “Le Bal des têtes” whose memories are so vast that they totter around as if on stilts. Moreover, it does not sustain specific, autobiographical events, which would be called forth through the function of memory proper. It pertains, rather, to that which conditions the possibility of memory: “absolute subjectivity” (Husserl 1991/1966, p. 79/75).
It is also this nesting structure that distinguishes memory from fantasy (because a fantasy would not be nested within retentions, unless, of course, we were recollecting a particular fantasy that we once entertained).
Likewise, it is true that, if I wish to remember the melody itself as an immanent object, I can reconstruct all of the pitches and durations in my mind’s eye (if I am familiar with the melody). I can, for example, imagine or visualize the notes notated on a page; then they are, in a sense, present for me in simultaneity, and I can focus upon a particular note at the end of the melody as easily as I might visualize one from the beginning.
Indeed, how can we study the movement of absolute subjectivity except by performing it ourselves? The movement, Husserl suggests, is impossible to put into language. In §36, “The Time-Constituting Flow as Absolute Subjectivity,” he concludes (famously), “We can say nothing other than the following: This flow is something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective time.’ It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as ‘flow.’ […] For all of this, we lack names” (Husserl 1991/1966, p. 79/75). Bernet provocatively argues that, “It demands a new style of phenomenological description oriented not toward perception or recollection of mental processes but toward retention and its structure of differential repetition. The task is, in place of an objectifying mirroring of the visible, to search for the ‘wanting names’ of those phenomena which cannot be named in the language of reflective phenomenology” (1983, p. 109). I suggest that music provides just such an opportunity to develop this “new style of phenomenological description.”
The “playing back” of a melody from a past performance demonstrates the paramount role of retention in generating a sense of musical movement—but the ordered flowing of the pitches of a melody is not exclusive to past experiences, of course. For example, I may recall a particular performance of the opening of the 2nd movement of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 by my local orchestra and, in playing it back in my mind, wince at the “cracked” note of the poor Wagner tuba player’s entrance; this experience, as we have seen, is different from recalling that the performer cracked a note. It is also distinct from the experience of just generally “playing through” Bruckner’s melody in my mind (outside of the context of a specific, remembered event). However, in this case (and important to note for our understanding of the temporal structure of nostalgia), common to each of these experience—whether “playing back” or “playing through”—is the ordered movement of the melodic flow.
It is in the Bernau Manuscripts that Husserl more carefully investigates the dynamic relation between retention and protention—the way that retentions and protentions are reciprocal. Here, for example, Husserl develops a metaphor for time-consciousness as a folded piece of paper, where protentions and retentions move respectively “up” and “down” the sides of the paper (2001a, p. 34).
It is true that On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) focuses largely on problems that pertain to the distinction between memory and retention. Certainly, although protention is mentioned, its role in time-consciousness remains largely underdeveloped in this text. However, in a marginal note in analysis no. 45, Husserl makes an important distinction between what I have described as having been “counted” through retention and what we must describe as the open “countability” of protention, writing: “But there is an essential difference between protention, which leaves open the way in which what is coming may exist and whether or not the duration of the object may cease and when it may cease, and retention, which is bound” (1991/1966, p. 309/297).
For example, how often do I not look back upon some past moment that, for example, I found embarrassing at the time but now I find amusing, or I look back with disappointment at some event that I had once anticipated with pleasure. The richness of the experience opened up through memory is, of course, why we spend so much of our human lives with memories as objects of fascination. And perhaps it is not so much that the memories themselves (as immanent objects) are important but that, through the sustaining of the self, they take on a certain significance.
James Hart points out that the German Heimweh can be translated as nostalgia but also as homesickness (1973, p. 398). There is, associated with the feeling of nostalgia, a longing for the sweetness of home. I understand this temporally, as a kind of longing for self-possession, rather than geographically.
Steven Crowell analyzes nostalgia as longing for a “past that was never present” (1999, p. 96). I have difficulty in accepting a description of nostalgia in particular as a longing for a past that was never present; on the contrary, as I understand it, recollection in fact gives us a past that was never present, insofar as protentions experienced as a part of a whole past moment become foreclosed or cancelled-out as retentions through the faculty of recollection; it is recollection that therefore gives us the past as it never was experienced (i.e., devoid of its own protentions). But nostalgia gives us the past sustained, through the protentions that remain potentially actualizable in the present, and therefore some part of the past as it was actually experienced.
The appropriate response to nostalgic experience, in this way, is a creative act (which, in my view, accounts for the way in which musical “works” call for repeated performances). James Hart hints at this dimension of nostalgia and its power of reverie when he writes, “Granting that there are moments of nostalgia, the condition for their possibility must be found in the synthetic way world as the absolute horizon of our retentional and protentional intentionality is gathered together in such moments. In persons capable of nostalgia and daydreaming, world is gathered in terms of a life-project akin to ‘the heart’s desire,’ the unum necessarium” (1973, p. 408). His reference to Augustine underlines the sense in which we may take works like the Confessions (and certainly also Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu) as the creative fruit of nostalgia.
It is important to emphasize that these protentions are never thematized in the mind of the listener or performer as anticipations. It is not that we hold in our present consciousness the expectation, for example, that a homorhythmic texture will be re-introduced, but rather that, when it is brought back again we experience a sense of its “fit”—its place within a larger whole.
The first rhyming couplet draws upon musical material from a sequence for the Annunciation; the final rhyming couplet is a formula common in Josquin’s time, appearing, for example, in paintings and miniatures. The longer, metric text in the middle of the motet was common to books of hours (particularly those from the Franco-Flemish region where Josquin spent his childhood) and is extant in a few different versions. (This accounts for some discrepancies between recordings and modern editions of the score.) See Mattfeld (1961, pp. 171–173). The structure of the text-within-a-text carries a certain symbolic weight. In the Renaissance, artists and composers were eager to incorporate numerical symbolism into their works; in particular, Mary is associated with the number five (as a counting of the most significant events of her life: the conception, the nativity, the annunciation, the purification, and the assumption) and the number seven (as a counting of the Seven Sorrows and the Seven Joys of the Virgin). On the symbolism that Josquin achieves in Ave Maria… virgo serena through the compilation of the two texts (five internal stanzas plus two external stanzas, giving seven in total), see Elders (2000, pp. 541–542).
The third section (at Ave cujus nativitas…), for example, begins with the same ascending perfect fourth (G to C) that we recognize from the opening of the piece, but employs the configuration of duets that we recognize from the second section. The final elongated phrase in this section returns to a texture of points of imitation (from superius to bassus, like the opening measures), but here—evoking the sixths of the second section—richly harmonized in thirds and triads. This interweaving between the experience of novel gestures and the recognition of familiar material helps to lead us, the listeners or performers, through the creation of sense as the music is ongoing.
Section six (at Ave praeclara omnibus…) makes a return to the duet textures that we have heard before, and this sense of familiarity is strengthened when the music makes an internal repeat (as the music at angelicis virtutibus renders a literal repeat of the music from Ave praeclara omnibus)—a marking out of what is second, internally, even as the section as a whole evokes a relation (as second) to our first encounter with the duet texture (in section two).
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Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies through the AIAS-COFUND Fellowship Programme under grant agreement number 609033 of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme and Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond in support of the research that produced this article.
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Wiskus, J. On memory, nostalgia, and the temporal expression of Josquin’s Ave Maria… virgo serena. Cont Philos Rev 52, 397–413 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09470-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09470-z