Musical Poverty
Since Puccini’s La Bohème at the latest, we have had a musical conception of how poor artists live. In Puccini, the story of impoverished artists is coupled with a virtually exquisite differentiation of expressive values and an opulent instrumentation: considering the subject, this could be seen as a mistaken choice of means. This contradiction seems later overcome in composers like Stravinsky or Satie, whose poverty is almost proudly exhibited. In Puccini, stage characters are the ones who use their manuscripts to fuel their ovens. During World War I, Igor Stravinksy drew all the consequences from the general disaster in his Histoire du Soldat; the piece was written for wandering theater and makes do with accordingly sparse musical possibilities. In his Ogives, piano pieces composed in a neo-Gregorian style, Satie made reference to the Middle Ages, while in other pieces, the co-called Néogrec pieces Gnossienes, Gymnopédies, and Socrate, he referred to ancient Greece. There has hardly ever been quite such a minimalist ornamentation as there was in Satie’s early piano music. A remembrance of the past or the mythological time contrasts with the experience of division that was affecting bourgeois society at that time more than ever before. In Stravinsky as well as in Satie, this reduction of means is linked towards a departure from an old aesthetic of expression, an indication of a new artistic self-conception.
But there have never been just economic aspects in the arts; these economic aspects exist also in light of genuine aesthetic questions, the most familiar of them being the notion of an economy of means, which almost demands a certain frugality. But aesthetic autonomy, that is, the independence of arts from representative social functions, means that the independence of an artist can also be rewarded with poverty. Under this aspect, the reduction of means becomes an aesthetic consequence. This follows from the realization that any proximity to power can only seem dubious to an art that understands itself as autonomous, that is, independent. Satie and Stravinksy saw themselves confronted with different economic conditions. Still today, taking pleasure in expensive materials in the arts retains its dubious character. Dada, Fluxus, arte povera, and low-tech concepts are variations of an aesthetic in which the material, precisely because it looks worn out and spent, can make the experience of our temporality as accessible as forms and aspects of the immaterial. Perhaps this means that a brief history of musica povera can already be written today.