Adam Berenson: Everything that no one ever saw

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Available from March 7, 2025 um 12:00 am
Item number: NEOS 12505-06 Category:
Published on: January 24, 2025

On Adam Berenson

 

 

Music doesn’t mean anything—or rather—it means whatever you think it means!

Adam Berenson

 

 

Is the text of Kafka merely an empty form, which evokes and contradicts the projections of 

meaning of its interpreters by means of the principle of a “sliding hallucination”?

Hans Hiebel

 

 

On listening to Berenson and detecting a general aesthetic, I am drawn to the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka styled himself “the most unmusical being I have ever encountered;” nonetheless, in my reading, he spoke explicitly of his “philosophy of music.”1 According to the Nobel Prize winning author Elias Canetti, Kafka is the “greatest expert on power.” At the same time, he is also a great—if not the greatest—expert on music. His thoughts on music and unmusicality are not laid out as a manual; they are distributed allegorically throughout his entire corpus. In coming to Berenson, an accomplished “student of Kafka”, I would like to think one can travel on a parallel track, and that is once again Kafka’s aesthetic.

Approaches to Kafka and music have generally been made through German Romantic views on music and its several powers. “Power” can suggest force without tendency; when rightly directed, it might be humanly enhancing, educative—even redemptive. Consider the power of music to “re-enchant” the world of the listener or acquaint him or her with a world of pure forms. But power also suggests inhumane violence; the listener is not sublimated; music “does violence” to his or her reason. It stands under suspicion as a luller of the senses, an invitation to nonsense, even to madness, “a derangement to the second power”—as the sheer event of an overpowering, in opposition to this or that legitimate faculty for constituting and strengthening the personal subject.

Kafka wrote in his diary: When it had become clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction of my being, everything thronged there and left empty all the abilities that were directed toward the pleasures of sex, [of] eating, [of] drinking, [of] philosophical reflection [of] music first and foremost.2 The Kafka-scholar Mark Anderson considers Kafka’s casting out the “pleasures [of] music” as central to Kafka’s modernist project, in which “music represents an organic, superfluous ‘ornament’ that the ascetic modernist must purge in order to write.”3 Here, then, we have the Habsburg modernist dread of the dark side of the Romantic argument—music as fleshly intoxication (“organic”) and music as allotria, as feckless play (“ornamental”), superfluous to the serious business of aesthetic self-fashioning.4

Kafka knew this dark side: in his great story Investigations of a Dog, his dog researcher experiences music for the first time, driving me out of my mind, whirling me around in circles, as if I myself were one of the musicians, while I was merely their victim, hurling me, however I begged for mercy, this way and that. On the other hand, recalling Anderson, “music represents an organic, superfluous ‘ornament’ that the ascetic modernist must purge in order to write.” There is something of both strains in Berenson’s music.

 

Here is Berenson’s vital piece for strings, a single movement titled mammisi for string quartet (“Mammisi” means “birthplace” in ancient Egyptian—an architectural symbol of divine nativity and perpetual renewal). The title sets a mood of hushed expectancy. You are listening, as the expression goes, “with your eyes,” but you do not know what you are about to hear. In the instant of attente, of attentive waiting, you are isolated: there is nothing in your acoustic repertoire that you can draw on, as if to “see” that you were right—as you might foresee where Wagner is headed in Das Rheingold, just when the anvils begin to be hammered. Here, in Berenson, what comes is always a surprise: every “note”—or “sound mote”—is unexpected. Each is new but distinguished by its intensity—its quality and amplitude—generating an inaudible structure of intensities beneath the skin of your attention, below acoustic memory and rational anticipation. You will grasp it, if at all, only when, as with Kafka’s novels, you have “read” to the end of it and then read it again. You cannot read Berenson’s quartet only once through: you must have the whole in mind before you can intuit the logic of one part of it. On this point, Wittgenstein, Schönberg and Adorno speak in a single voice. Writing of Schönberg’s notion of the “subcutaneous” in music, Adorno declares his “belief that Schönberg’s concept of subcutaneous structuring is valid for all music of genuine quality in all its aspects. By this I [Adorno] mean nothing more than the capability of developing all aspects of whatever sensuously appears here and now as aspects of a unified sense that obeys its own logic. This sense is neither to be understood as something that is presented by music nor as its expression; it does not exist detached from the music itself, but rather is, again according to a phrase by Schönberg, something that is sayable only through music.”5

Berenson’s newness is a prime instance of what Wittgenstein, in his Blue Book, also sees as the conatus of music: “Music conveys to us itself.” I will add that this music is a pure “saying” of what you are not … opening up a prospect of a subsequent return to yourself, to enjoy the fruits of accomplishment, of a valid exhaustion. Kafka’s words enrich this event. Although he speaks literally of reading “a good book,” I will have him speak of music. I want his words for our experience: The eternity that I am is too narrow for me. For example, if I hear a good piece of music … it awakens me, if it satisfies me, it is sufficient for me. Proof that I did not previously include this music in my eternity or had not penetrated to the intuition of that eternity, which also necessarily includes this music. At a certain stage of knowledge, fatigue, dissatisfaction, constriction, self-contempt must disappear, namely, where I have the power to recognize as my own being that which, formerly as something foreign, refreshed satisfied, liberated, elevated me. This is the task of the listener, your very own—Kafka again: No pupil far and wide.

There is a propaedeutic in the newness that Berenson brings. Rightly understood, everything is new. Being is a continual surprise, a perpetual outpouring of new things. Failing to be surprised is an effect, as we’ve heard, of tiredness, dissatisfaction, constriction, self-contempt. Listening to Berenson is an exercise in attending to the new. The lazy ear will hear noise; but after repetitions, you will have it: noise reborn as music: unpleasure into pleasure. Berenson has gone to the far reaches of noise to bring home his booty as music: it is a salvaging, a discovery of un“told” riches.

Berenson, like Kafka, is at once creator and philosopher of the new. Both give us creatures never before seen or heard on land or sea: Berenson, his music—Kafka, his Gregor Samsa, the afflicted man-bug; Poseidon, the head bureaucrat of underwater offices; a singing mouse, a scholarly dog, an acculturated ape who has attained the culture of an average European; but Kafka is unwilling to qualify his creations as singularly new, for everything, rightly approached, is new. When Max Brod, Kafka’s salvager and booster, showed him his [Brod’s] essay on newness, Kafka responded critically with a seeming exercise in formal logic, quite musical in its bursts of fantasy. “On this concept of the new … really everything is new, for since all objects are caught in a forever changing time and illumination, and it is no different with us observers: we therefore must always encounter them at a different place.” Thereafter, Kafka gives a rich social and existential meaning to Brod’s abstract term “apperception,” infusing it with the modern consciousness of fatigue. Fatigue, tiredness, exhausts in advance the newness of the object and works against its aesthetic apperception.

 

The String Quartet No. 4 in two movements opens quietly, then with an eloquent cry, followed by sounds suggestive of whispering; activity/motion; the edge of pain; a rumbling threat; conversation; deep contentment; running cries; ascending a scale; descending a scale; almost a voice, and more. The first movement harbors many such individual “speaking” elements, articulate, personal-sounding voices, discontinuous among pauses. Like the briefer mammisi, you need to listen intently: you are not equipped to anticipate the next sound-mote. You will realize, only later, that the movement arrived at peak intensity at its exact midpoint, at 09:16.

The whole is a sequence of representations, prompting something between feelings and thoughts, offering not so much accomplished real-world acoustic parallels as feeling-intuitions, intimations of recognizable sound. In Kafka, too, feelings and thoughts combine, as in his apercu on reading Dostoevsky: Special method of thinking. Shot through and through with feeling. Everything feels itself to be a thought, even what is least definite.

At 10:15 you are at skyey heights, an acoustic suggestion of Kafka’s parable of the crows, who maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. That is no doubt true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens means precisely: the impossibility of crows.

At 12:57–58, you have another parabolic suggestion: Kafka’s The Top. A “philosopher” believes that complete knowledge of one small thing—here, a children’s toy, a spinning top—would convey knowledge of the entire universe. To this end, seeing children at play, he leaps at their top, meaning to “grasp” the secret of its spinning, and by literally grasping the object, kills it. The secret of its spinning remains elusive (and herewith an ironic commentary on this commentator’s attempt to grasp the enigmas of the fourth quartet).

The first movement contains lengthier pauses that refresh your powers of attention. It then scales down subtly and gradually to its close, ending as quietly as it began, on a note, perhaps, of … earned exhaustion. Here, finally, one might think of Kafka’s The Castle, where the experience of interpretation, we learn, once again ends in valid fatigue. Says The Castle-prostitute Olga: It is impossible to judge the letters correctly. They themselves continually change in value, the reflections they give rise to are endless, and precisely where one stops is determined only by chance, and so our judgment of them is also a matter of chance.6 The “chance” stopping is the moment of exhaustion. The interpretation still standing at that point is “right”—for now. Tiredness is another name for the intrusion of what afterwards seems chance.

The second movement flows powerfully under the rule of a very different aesthetic. Distinct elements float in one essentially sustained sound, which Berenson likens to a “wind tunnel, with artifacts,” haunting sonic additions. The continuity of the movement—it has only a single pause at 16:05—contrasts with the interrupted narrative of the first movement and can seem to ground it. Many of its artifacts are especially beautiful, as at 8:20–8:40, and poignant, as at ca. 22:25. There are remarkable surprises, as at 18:40–19:00, the Fibonacci point, when a sort of wooden drumming gives birth to a soprano. (This “rattling” effect is produced by the first violinist’s pressing the bow behind the bridge, near the tailpiece.) On completing the second movement, the listener may recall having heard this pregnant rattling before, at the beginning of the movement at 0:52, and with it enjoy the one virtually symmetrical event in the entire quartet. We find a comparable contrast of lyricism (the “soprano”) and the noise of empirical experience (the “rattling” effect) in Berenson’s concerto for piano.

 

Here, the force of acoustic association is more pronounced than in the quartets. Berenson labels the piece: Everything that no one ever saw, concerto for piano and electronics. I hear it as a concerto inside a tone poem, suggesting, magically per synthesizer, not everything that no one ever saw but rather everything that one has ever heard but never expected to find recovered, abstracted from, and with remarkable inventiveness, joined as music.

I hear these sound-motes as a satisfying index of a world of noise, everything I have ever heard. In sequence: traffic noise; an announcement; street conversation; the hint of a hurdy-gurdy; a storm coming; a child skipping rope; wind; water gurgling down a drain; bells; a rabbit panting; a tugboat horn; bicycle bells; Morse code; a piano at a cocktail lounge; an ambulance; an airplane landing; a plaintive cry; a doorbell; tinsel tinkling; a cat’s meowing; a turkey’s gobble-gobble; a running upstairs; a complaint; a wind tunnel; a helicopter; explosions; an airplane taking off; a foghorn; jazz piano; rifle shots; a warning signal; sustained cries of pain; some luscious Mahlerian strings at 14:35, and more of this sort for another 36 minutes. I can imagine the piece as a puzzle for Mensa: how many human sounds can you detect in x-minute intervals?

Even more engaging, floating through it all, is a melodious piano, the protagonist, tying the piece to history, proceeding in sublime world denial. “He seems to think he is inhabiting a romantic (Brahmsian) piano concerto from the nineteenth century. Now, he’s in what he may imagine to be a slow movement; now a scherzo” (Berenson). His immunity from the world, to the noise of reality, is the organizing tension of the piece, its subcutaneous thrust.

Without intending to, Gilles Deleuze provides a theoretical commentary to Berenson’s concerto. Deleuze listens with his eyes to the world as a chaos of fragments (street noises heard in sequence do not repair the chaos). Any prospect of harmony or wholeness lies in the work of art—emphasis on work.7 Contrary to certain expectations, the work of art does not “transcend” the noise of the world: in sublimating its features, it reminds us, at the same time, of the world in which, as a work, it is situated, alongside other forms and works, like houses and laboratories and bridges. When an acolyte, emulating Deleuze, writes that the unity of an artwork is produced “by an added part—a final brushstroke, an impersonal point of view, a seed crystal,” he can have been thinking of Berenson’s piano-protagonist, an element that retroactively induces a whole … The formal principle of the whole … interconnects incommensurable and non-communicating parts and only intensifies their differences. The order of art, then, is no retreat from the world, but a response in kind, the production of a world of connected fragments that unfold from an insistent difference. The modern work of art is a Joycean “chaosmos,” a chaos-become-cosmos, but a particular cosmos constructed according to the formal principles of chaos, the singular, individual cosmos of the artist …

 

Stanley Corngold

 

Notes

 

1  He is “completely unmusical (vollständig unmusikalisch), with a completeness that in … [his] entire experience … [he] has never before encountered.” Briefe an Milena, ed. Jürgen Born and Michael Müller (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1983), 122.

 

2  Franz Kafka, The Diaries, trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Schocken, 2022), 176. Tagebücher, ed. Michael Müller (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990), 341.

 

3
Mark Anderson, “‘Jewish’ Music? Otto Weininger and ‘Josephine the Singer,’” in Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 194.

 

4
The preceding two paragraphs are abstracted from SC and Benno Wagner, Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 2011), 93.

 

5
Theodore Adorno, “Das Erbe und die neue Musik,” in Musikalische Schriften V, vol. 18 of Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 688.

 

6 Franz Kafka, Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982), 363.

 

7 Abstracted from Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Literature (NY: Routledge, 2003), 58.

 

 

 

 

On my second and fourth String Quartets

 

Although my second and fourth string quartets were composed at quite a temporal distance from one another (the interval between them occupied by my wholly unique—and wholly unrelated— third quartet, which was commissioned by the JACK Quartet, and premiered in Philadelphia in 2013), the pieces are “genetically” similar.  

 

My second string quartet or mammisi for string quartet (“birth place” in Coptic) as I titled it, was composed for a music composition competition meant to yield a work to be performed in an ancient Egyptian exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania in 2011. Although I didn’t win the competition, the short piece that I produced was very important to me. It’s here that I explored techniques and sensibilities for the first time, with strings, that were derived from my recent and significant compositional inspirations of that time (and ultimately all time): Beat Furrer, Matthias Pintscher, and Helmut Lachenmann. I employed and explored the bowing and extended techniques that are part of their worlds, and now, are part of my own.  

 

When the QRTT quartet (in Philadelphia) finally recorded this piece in March of 2023 (along with my 4th quartet), I discovered that those influences were strongly present, but also—to my delight—that the work sounded like “me” none-the-less.

 

My String Quartet No. 4 was composed in 2019. In two movements, it explores, as previously stated, a world that is in the same part of the cosmos as mammisi. It’s my feeling that the musical zeitgeist informs the sensitive and careful composer/auditor that serious new music typically inhabits the “negative spaces” in the sonic domain where “music once lived.” The first movement exists in the shadows; just leaving “textual traces.” Thus, the movement is a kind of four-way conversation that takes place in the dark, with whispers (nothing ever rises above “piano”).
It utilizes the “greyscale”: a movement comprised of a mixture of black and white, as it were. This movement seems to me to be influenced—melodically and expressively/aesthetically—by Matthias Pintscher.  

Is the second movement the “void of human subjectivity?” The only hint of pitch comes—momentarily, on two occasions—from a rattling effect produced by the first violin. It’s effectively a kind of “endless” tunnel of noise; a hypnotic journey from “nothing” to, perhaps “nothing.” I find it particularly therapeutic, and it’s fascinating to me because it seems to operate in a Cageian way. It’s the sonic artifacts, or “mistakes,” inadvertently produced during the journey that may capture one’s attention. The primary sonic substance, i.e. noise, isn’t—apparently—the subject matter of the movement.

 

Adam Berenson

 

 

 

A circular trajectory: I was born and raised in and near Philadelphia. I journeyed to New York to attend the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where I studied film production. I then traveled to Boston to attend The New England Conservatory for graduate school, where I studied composition and jazz piano performance. I then made a full-circle return to Philadelphia to begin teaching and composing/recording. I’ve been working and creating music unrelentingly since the highly productive time I spent in Boston. I now have more than 60 albums (of often “genre-less” music) and dozens of “concert music” compositions. Many of my recordings are comprised of my improvised music (solo and with ensembles); and this improvised music reveals and reflects all of the musical genres (as well as a plethora of other art forms) that have informed my life. These influences include classical music, contemporary concert music, avant-garde jazz, rock and popular music, film, photography, drawing, and painting.  

I was given a clarinet to play in the third grade, and to my great consternation and frustration, I couldn’t wrap my fingers nor head around the instrument. I was apparently too young for this sophisticated and unwieldly instrument. However—and most significantly—as soon I could play three distinct notes on the clarinet, my immediate inclination was to compose.  And I recall the title of the resultant, little clarinet piece very clearly: “Circle Music.” I was delighted many years later to learn that for Plato, the circle was not only the most perfect form, but that the World Soul is comprised of circular motions, producing the divine “harmony of the spheres.”   

 

I’ve long felt that if I have one overarching gift, it is my general creativity. Because I believe that I function in the world in a primarily intuitive and emotional way, it seems logical to me that I am drawn to music over and above all else. In this space—a domain that seems to operate most effectively when inspiration is drawn from feelings first—I can express my own inner world; my sense of the perception and construction of my life-world; my fantasy and whimsy: and I can often do all of these things spontaneously, through improvisation. I can express ideas and feelings instantly in a way that is satisfying and authentic to me.  

 

The string quartets and the piano concerto on this album are the results of my instincts, interests, and education i.e., the way I perceive and feel the world. I had to write the musical information on paper—for the string quartets—in order to it give it to the players/interpreters, but I believe that the content employed, and the resultant form, developed in the same way they would have had I somehow been able to improvise upon all of the instruments—or draw the music onto paper in real time, with four hands writing out the music for the individual instruments simultaneously.

On the other hand, my concerto for piano and electronics Everything that no one ever saw is entirely improvised. The foundation of synthesized sounds—which function here as the “orchestra”—were chosen beforehand; and I then spontaneously overdubbed these chosen sounds in an arbitrary sequence, and in multiple passes, to make up the “orchestra” part. I then had the resultant backing-track play in headphones, whilst I improvised on the acoustic piano (in one take) to try and thread the wildly various—and electronic—sonic events together with a lyrical line.

The cumulative energy of all the music on this album strikes me as my own liberated essence sans a material container.

 

Adam Berenson

www.adamberenson.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Program

 

 

CD 1

[01] Everything that no one ever saw Concerto for Piano and Electronics (2024)


Yamaha GH1 Baby Grand piano, Korg Triton Extreme,
Sequential Oberheim OB-6, Sequential Prophet Rev2,
Sequential Pro 3, Oberheim OB-X8/Boss Space Echo RE-202

 

CD 2

[01] mammisi for string quartet (2011)

 

[02] String Quartet No. 4 (2019)

QRTT

 

first recordings

Info

Catalog number: NEOS 12505-06

EAN: 4260063125058

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