For Connoisseurs and Amateurs,
or,
La Frénésie, ou le Désespoir, sous le Domino noir.
No sound save hushed breaths challenges contemplative silence. Anticipation has captured the room and holds its inhabitants hostage; all eyes rest upon the same figures, all minds on the same subject. Then, with a more pointed inhalation and that subtle preparatory motion of shoulder and wrist, it begins.
The restraint of this soggetto belies a covert angularity. Wandering, it adorns itself with a palate of chromaticism, leaning on tendency tones as a false beggar on her crutch. Now a second voice enters; the pair circle cautiously around each other, tangling in the rigorous dance of first species. As they dissolve into nervous countermelody, the alto further complicates matters, and he leans forward in his chair to rest chin atop steepled palms. A sequence commandeers the episode, paradoxically wedding stable repetition to the imbalance of obscured tonic. His calculations are already finished: inversion at the unison and twelfth, considerable potential for stretto. He waits to hear the fugato out, knowing that—like all of his predictions—these will come true.
Music is a multifarious thing. The purposes it serves vary by species, language, and locale, but in few cultures does it restrict itself to a single function. Music may be an imitation of speech and a transcendence of it, communicating ideas and ideologies, time-worn legend or incumbent news. Sentients across the worlds lull their young with music, at times the same they use to grieve their dead. Song may motivate the listener to dance, to work, to mate, to come and buy. The musics of the galaxy accompany a hundred thousand different rituals and praise twice as many gods. Thus it is a trifle surprising that, among the Coruscanti elite, music serves almost exclusively to entertain.
The bass falls away, revealing the upper voices entangled in agonized suspensions. They prove suddenly earnest in their isolation. The pedal point saves them, a promise of resolution; the tierce de picardie betrays them, false hope of redemption. It takes a single chromatic inflection to destroy that hard-won cadence.
This is not to suggest that entertainment is an unusual role for music; on the contrary, it is among the most common, and likely the most ancient. The surprise lies instead in the single-mindedness—some might say 'narrow-mindedness'—with which the upper crust of the galactic capitol approach this admirable art. For them, music-making is an occasion or an attribute of an occasion. Take, for example, the opera. The Queen of the Core has idle classes amply sufficient to support a dozen full-season opera houses. The aforementioned idle classes, however, patronize the aforementioned opera houses for motives ancillary to art. One attends the Galaxies or the Coruscant Opera to chat in one's box, form cabals, nap, trade stock or mistresses, earn cultural cache merely by arriving on the stair in suitably elaborate dress. Most of all, one attends to see and be seen.
The scherzo takes its jokes too seriously, losing impetus at the ends of phrases as if suddenly touched with melancholy or self-consciousness. It recovers the momentum of its initial joyous romp at each refrain, but only with increasing difficulty; acciaccature nip at its heels, mocking momentary lapses. The melody passes to each voice in turn and is bruised and distorted by their grasping hands.
Music is an accommodating thing. Given adept practitioners and time to adapt, it will mold itself flawlessly to the occasion at hand. When afforded only incidental consideration, it becomes obligingly incidental. The music of the opera panders to an audience that is listening with half an untrained ear. Its bases are simple patterns perceptible even to the most musically illiterate. Nor do other facets of the production demand intellectual engagement. Operatic plots are equally grounded in trope. Guided by conventions that supersede logic, they take place in well-ordered, simplistic worlds, at once constructing and upholding the moral order by which their patrons live. The whole combines to form an art easily apprehended and appreciated. If singing does not entertain you, there is an orchestra; if the orchestra fails to please, there are acting, scenery, costumes, exoticism, spectacle. This art asks nothing of its auditors, not even attention.
A tangle of dissonance marks a sudden turn to the dramatic. From this confusion the soprano emerges, spinning fioratura as effortlessly as a politician does lies. Here art imitates nature, and instruments sing.
He has always enjoyed opera while disliking opera-going. Regular attendance is a must for one in his position and with his ambitions. Only a fool would disregard the political utility of an arena in which the audience does the bulk of the performing; in this microcosm, he can test the hidden tensions and interconnections that keep the Republic, for the moment, whole. He holds court from his loge and smiles down at the poor fools in the parterre. The shallowness of it all, useful though it may prove, tends to repel him.
The aria has unwound into a scena, a discourse for treble and tenor that threatens to spoil into a yelling match. The remaining voices cower in the middle, content to be onlookers to the battle. An outcry in octaves overturns the argument. Unison—like nakedness, and like unvarnished truth—has the virtue of honesty, but is far too embarrassing for frequent recourse.
He would find it all rather distasteful, were it not so amusing; actor that he is, he recognizes the ruse. In stage and house there is pageantry, an illusion of grandeur that contrasts with the utilitarian nature of backstage. This duplicity should be evident to anyone who understands the principles of showmanship; all save the myopic can tell elegance from gewgaws and grease paint. Still, such part of the attendees as pay attention are duped. More to the point: they are happy to be duped; they pay twelve hundred credits per season to be duped. The worlds constructed upon the stage are ones that embrace artifice. Opera does not try to be reality, but something more spectacular, more splendid. For its troubles, it is largely disregarded; he overlooks neither the irony, nor the expediency. The farce goes on, and he, and the opera, shall continue to dazzle.
Endless elision blurs formal boundaries. The affect is changing so rapidly as to induce whiplash, now earnest, now dancelike, now verging on grotesquerie. This is a lullaby to induce nightmares: the maudlin melody is accompanied by harsh accents, inexplicable dissonance, ornaments that fall in all the wrong places. An out-of-context cadenza concludes the codetta, a perversion of bel canto.
Music is an intricate thing. The opera is for amateurs, and he does not dabble. It was the most erudite and abstruse of musics that attracted him and his long-cultivated taste for the esoteric. His would be an impossible position did he not delight in challenges, and hence he prefers music that demands something of its devotees. Unlike the opera, chamber music has no clear-cut function. It serves no practical purpose, ornaments no fête, conveys nothing but the most abstract information. To the untutored eye, it may seem without any goal save indulgence in its own convolutions. At the root, however, it too aims at amusement. The difference is that chamber music is meant not for an uneducated public but for the entertainment and intellectual stimulation of the professional musician. In its purest form it has no audience, indulged in for its own sake and for the ears of none but the players themselves. The aural and structural complexities are intended, by their very nature, to restrict appreciation to those who have devoted their lives to music; its only other students are connoisseurs.
The folk-song simplicity of the interlude seems a respite. It proves a brief one, soon interrupted by frenetic, directionless lines. Hints of melodies buzz by too quickly to catch, like a gnat near one's ear. These busy lines fly about, confused and aimless, dissolving without warning to start again as suddenly. A mordant sinks poisoned teeth into the folksong, and it quivers and dies.
He prides himself that, though not a musician, he is conversant in the language of the professional. When he opens his home (technically the Republic's, although the distinction is by now immaterial) to this little gathering, all meet on plane leveled by their dedication to the art at hand. The realm of the specialist has always drawn him—he is, in some ways, the ultimate possessor of gnostic knowledge—so the labor required was scarcely a burden. To this pursuit he has offered long years of study, of humble listening, of devotion to the art. As with all his other sacrifices, he finds the gain well worth its price. The test of the connoisseur is his understanding of form, his ability to parse and prognosticate it. Such an adept appreciates how the simple pattern iterate-disassemble-reiterate elaborates into the dazzling density of sonata-allegro, does not merely follow the permutations of a soggetto but predicts them. At this he excels.
The rhythms tease, relentless changes of phrase length and melodic direction enough to prompt a kind of motion sickness. When all four voices band together for a triumphal fanfare, it is as though nothing had ever been wrong. Putting on a decent show will convince nearly everyone, regardless of the validity of one's rhetoric.
Such exercises are a pleasant indulgence, but he has seen beyond them. Like many lovers of music, he finds the greatest gratification in having his expectations denied, in the subversion of tropes and manipulation of conventions. The pleasure in knowing the rules is to realize when they are being broken. The uninformed listener may wholly overlook a reversed recapitulation, or notice it for superficial reasons. To the connoisseur, it is at once destabilizing, unnerving, and thrilling, an aural adrenaline that stems from the thrill of misbehavior.
Solemn staccati mark the return to minor. This is a dirge, a lament, a hymn of penance or supplication.
Music, above all, is a deceptive thing. He long suspected and now has come to know that formal aberrations are no aberrations at all, but a glimpse into the true existence of the music. Order is a limitation those of narrow perspective impose upon phenomena too complex—too chaotic—for them to otherwise understand. Flaunting of formal convention tears the veil from these simplifications, allowing the listener to perceive the whole. It is even more gratifying that this whole is one in which order degenerates into disorder, one that heralds the inevitable triumph of entropy, of darkness.
The tempo picks up to become a ghostly march or a dance of demons. Music that is both brisk and quiet has a tendency to unnerve. This soft swiftness is punctuated by the acerbic shrieks of the soprano and groans in the bass.
The masses wish above all to preserve their sense of safety, and in so doing cling to progress. They find faith in pretty myths of logic, reason, order. These ideas are pleasant ones, but false. While the ignorant may keep to comfortable delusions, believing that some brand of progress—intellectual, technical, moral—will prove salvific in the end, the thinking man has no such hope. The psychologist probes sentient behavior and finds at its center everything but rationalism. The physicist knows that she affects all she observes; objectivity proves a foxfire guiding to unsafe ground. It is impossible for any process, no matter how idealized, to reduce the entropy of a system to its zero point value in a finite number of operations—in other words: chaos wins.
The dance circles inward, trapping its listeners within ever-more-complex counterpoint. A drone creates a maddening sense of suspense before the march returns, increasingly frenetic, increasingly frightening.
Such knowledge can be paralyzing. The complacent deny the chaos; intellectuals face it in spite of their fears. He, however, chooses a third path. He looks entropy in the eye and bends it to his will. That which cannot be overcome can still be harnessed. He embraces chaos, the destructive power that is the innermost heart and true motivation of the universe. To listen to this music is to see the source of all his strength. Everything else is a mere short-lived syncope struggling against the pulse of his ambitions. He hears, in a formal quirk, a return of art to its natural state of disharmony—to the natural state of all things. He has gazed into the abyss, and seen that it was empty.
Sidious listens, and the music continues: note against note, point against point, proceeding inexorably to its dissolution.
...
finis ef 7.30.2013, rev. 8.23.2013
(The Star Wars franchise, as I am only too painfully aware, is not mine, nor are the laws of entropy. A second disclaimer: Sidious' musical aesthetic in no way reflects that of the authoress! Criticism is welcomed.)