Arnold Schoenberg's String Quartets: The Weight of an Alp

8th of August, 2024

Marx wrote that “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Marx’s original German, “…wie ein Alp auf dem Gehirne…”, renders the force that weighs on the brain not as the German equivalent for the English “nightmare” (wie ein Albtraum) but the word “Alp”. The Alp in German folklore is a demonic creature believed to sit on one's chests while one sleeps, causing bad dreams. But on top of the usual supernatural stylings Marx loves to use—we must not forget that “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”—the German rendering also places on the temple of the waking dreamer the mass of a mountain of the alps. It is this that most impressed me upon finding this original phrase: that history is dualistic; that it pretends toward the spirit of dreams and the material of great, solid, icy rock, despite in fact partaking of neither.

The above is a key, and I mean that in the musical sense but also in the sense that it unlocks something. The thing I hope that what it will unlock for you is some sort of essential crystalline dust that I see, or perhaps imagine, in this quotation from Schoenberg:

“I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!”

The below is not a key.

“I learnt of a man who fitted security camera systems. He installed the cameras themselves, prominently placed to deter wrong-doers; and he installed the monitoring equipment, hidden away in a back office; and sometimes he also installed screens in public areas so people could see themselves being recorded and know that the cameras were not dummies. He was a good worker—prompt, efficient—and jobs were plentiful. But one day he was contracted to install CCTV in a railway station, and he bolted the cameras to the wall as usual, and he wired up the monitors in the office on platform six, but when it came to installing a public screen in the station foyer, he decided—who knows why?—to introduce a time delay, so that whatever was shown was what had been filmed five minutes earlier. Whenever passengers glanced upwards expecting to see themselves looking at themselves, they found they were ahead of their time, and not there at all.”
—stilton, RateYourMusic review of The Tired Sounds Of by Stars of the Lid

Further Reading:

Fairy Tales and Their Antagonism By Modernity
Cædmon the Outsider
Eleven Aphorisms About Silence via Dreaming or Structure or Both