Voicing trauma: ungraspable idea and comprehensible presentation In Arnold Schoenberg's String Trio, Op. 45 and A survivor from Warsaw

Abstract

Discussions surrounding musical meaning and traumatic memory both focus on the ineffability of their subjects, the fact that words and concrete narrative structures will never capture the inner reality of musical expression or the traumatic past. This study seeks to explore how this overlap of disciplinary concerns can be used as a lens through which to examine musical representations of trauma. Musicologists interested in the nature of musical meaning more broadly tend to overlook composer Arnold Schoenberg’s conception of the musical idea, which engages with the complex relationship between what music expresses (which he believes is fundamentally ungraspable) and its comprehensible means of expression (its analysable musical structures). In creating this distinction, Schoenberg establishes a model for engaging with music that allows for analytical modes of engagement, while simultaneously preserving the notion that musical meaning is fundamentally spiritual and exists beyond the confines of human logic. As a result of recent developments in neurobiology, contemporary trauma studies has begun to turn away from the notion that traumatic memory exists solely in the mind, and instead locates it within the entire body’s response to trauma. As we learn more about the somatic traces that trauma leaves behind, we must examine the emphasis placed on linguistic linear narratives, both in the treatment and representation of trauma. In many discussions surrounding how aesthetic works engage with trauma, there is a tendency to treat these representations as if they are suffering from, rather than communicate the disruptive effects of traumatic memory. I would like to build on contemporary musicological studies that suggest music has the capacity to embody the disruptive effects of trauma by examining how traumatic memory is manifested in Schoenberg’s String Trio, Op. 45 (which was written while he was still recovering from a heart attack) and his Holocaust cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw. Ultimately, this study seeks to examine whether the overlap between Schoenberg’s conception of the musical idea and contemporary understandings of traumatic memory can provide a valuable lens through which to view his engagement with trauma in his String Trio and Survivor, and point to music’s broader capacity to communicate the disruptive effects of trauma rather than perform a failure of representation.