Metamorphosen

This post originally appeared on my new Substack, “About Music”, over the weekend. I am still feeling out that platform, but I will not normally re-post things I write there to this site. So, use this referral link to subscribe so you don’t miss any of my observations!

This is my first post on substack. I see this space as a potential backup for Twitter, should that place no longer continue to exist or transform into something in which I can no longer participate. I have been a heavily active Twitter user for over a decade; I love the platform’s potential to build community across geographical boundaries, traditional hierarchies, and other obstacles that stifle in-person connections. Also, video and image-centered social media feel foreign to my default mode of expression: words.

If Twitter goes away, I will miss the brevity it imposed on its users. You do not know this, but I added this paragraph after I started the following two because I could tell I was getting carried away. I find there is such a temptation to perform through the writing, which is an aesthetic my younger self struggled to resist. Social media, in general, encourages us to perform, and I have engaged in, observed, and rejected manifestations of this impulse throughout my time on Twitter. We will see what happens here.

I am a composer, so it may seem strange that I love writing so much, but these outlets are not unrelated. There is a rhythm to these words. You audiate these sentences as you read them, such that your engagement with this post is, essentially, aural. This text’s structure has a shape like the unfolding phrases of a solo cello melody. Identifying a singular voice here is important, as this writing has one narrator, and, if we are comparing this medium to music, one of prose’s critical shortcomings is that you cannot have overlapping layers without chaos.

In music, we adore the simultaneous presence of varied sonic statements. The concept of counterpoint, for example, exists chiefly as a way to regulate overlapping voices and make them cooperate, within certain rules. All music, in one way or another, is created through multiple people’s interactions, whether that is a garage band or string quartet working together in real time to perform a piece, or whether that is a bedroom producer making a beat with an open source developer’s software instrument. Something I teach in my college courses is that musical meaning is created through the confluence of multiple perspectives: in other words, we all have a say in what music is and means, so any piece of music is a kind of polyphony. Another aspect of this concept is that meaningful connections between musical works and superficially non-musical events abound, as the following demonstrates.

This post’s title comes from a composition by Richard Strauss that I listened to and posted to Twitter on the evening of November 17, 2022, which was one the first big nights of mourning Twitter’s imminent demise (perhaps of many). Strauss composed Metamorphosen (1945) for an ensemble of 23 solo string instruments in the final months of World War Two. It is an impulsive, fraught, and introspective work that, to me, suggests Strauss’s reflection on his naiveté as an aspirationally apolitical participant in Germany’s Nazi government.

I find Metamorphosen to be overwhelmingly sad. Unfolding, for the most part, in the manner of developing variations, Strauss composes ecstatic moments whose energy feels pitifully desperate when framed, as they are, by undeterred statements of resignation, defeat, and failure. To eliminate any doubt about the work’s symbolism, Strauss quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony in Metamorphosen’s final phrase, an intertextual reference that seems to to illustrate Strauss’s acceptance of the end of career, the destruction of the Europe he knew, and the obsolence of the nineteenth century Romantic aesthetic altogether.

In this moment of Twitter’s apparent twilight, I find certain resonances in Metamorphosen’s funereal regrets. Like this current generation of social media, Richard Strauss’s late career explicitly enabled authoritarians in exchange for access and opportunity. That Metamorphosen seems to contemplate the errors in this worldview is meaningful at a time when many Twitter users attempt to assess the longitudinal costs and benefits of their experiences on the platform, while at the same time anticipating the overall losess resulting from its potential inaccessibility.

Metamorphosen’s title alludes to transformation, and its content suggests destructive change is inescapable. One of the piece’s dominant characteristics and most powerful symbols is counterpoint, which gives its solo parts the illustion of indepence. However, the dream advanced by Metamorphosen’s passages of explosive, indulgent, and animated polyphony gives way to a doomed reality in which order must be maintained. In many ways, Twitter is defined by a similar conflict involving its enforcement of and resistance to hierarchy. What Metamorphosen acknowledges that Twitter yet has not is finality. Strauss knows his world has changed forever: do we know the same is true for social media?