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MUSIC MINUS MEMORY

Paths in the Fog, The music (commonly and vaguely) called rockhas been inundating the sonic environment of daily life for twenty years; itseized possession of the world at the very moment when the twentieth centurywas disgustedly vomiting up its history; a question haunts me: was thiscoincidence mere chance? Or is there some hidden meaning to the conjunctionof the centurys final trials and the ecstasy of rock? Is the century hoping toforget itself in this ecstatic howling? To forget its utopias foundering in horror?

To forget its art?11

Theodor Adorno, much like Kundera, believes that classical music is abearer of memory which forces listeners to remember the pain of history.Adorno writes that modern music has taken upon itself all the darkness andguilt of the world.13 He was disturbed by the thought of art that would refuseto remember the atrocities of history, since he believes that such art would bean injustice against those who have suffered persecution. In the end ofAesthetic Theory, he allows himself a (rare) speculation that the future may be

better than the present, and that the affirmative art of the past may be morerelevant to a future society than it is to our current damaged world: If todayart has become the ideological complement of a world not at peace, it ispossible that the art of the past will someday devolve upon society at peace.14

This possibility, however, alarms Adorno as soon as he has expressed it: Itwould, however, amount to the sacrifice of its freedom were new art to returnto peace and order, to affirmative replication and harmony.15 He becomesconcerned that future art may be affirmative and peaceful; if this were tooccur, it would be a crime against those who have suffered. Art must take uponitself the guilt of society, so it would be wrong for artworks to be beautiful andharmonious in a traditional sense. He ends his book by stating but then whatwould art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory ofaccumulated suffering.16

In Paths in the Fog, for example, he argues that there is no melodicdevelopment in popular music, and that this lack of development is linked tothe lack of memory possessed by this music. He writes that popular music isthe prolongation of a single moment of ecstasy; and since ecstasy is a momentwrenched out of timea brief moment without memory, a moment surroundedby forgettingthe melodic motif has no room to develop, it only repeats,without evolving or concluding.24The same idea appears in Improvisation inHomage to Stravinsky: Ecstasy, on the other hand, cannot be mirrored in amelody, because memory strangled by ecstasy is incapable of retaining thesequence of notes in a melodic phrase, however short.25

Benson explains that As Kundera is eager to demonstrate, a belief inmusics palliative care is far from the only way of conceiving the relationbetween music and language; indeed, as we shall see, it is far from Kunderasown construction.However, it serves here as an expression of a commonly held construction,whereby music is somehow extracultural, an escape from the messycontingencies of life in the language world.411Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry

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Heim (New York: Penguin Books, 1981) 181.11Kundera, Paths in the Fog, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New

York: HarperCollins 1995) 235.13Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchelland Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Continuum 2002) 133.14Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press 1997) 260.15Adorno,Aesthetic Theory260.16Adorno,Aesthetic Theory261.24Kundera, Paths in the Fog 235.25Kundera, Improvisation in Homage to Stravinsky 86.26Kundera, The Book165.27Kundera, Ignorance 33.28Kundera, Identity, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins 1998)29Kundera, The Book22.30Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York:HarperPerennial 1993) 148.

41Stephen Benson, For Want of a Better Term?: Polyphony and the Valueof Music in Bakhtin and Kundera, Narrative 11.3 (2003) 292.