Nick Cascino

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Can we imagine a world driven by artistic freedom of expression, converging on us from the outside but also driven from within? Can we all achieve that “total work of art” often espoused in theory but rarely attained?

Gesamtkunstwerk is a German word meaning “total work of art,” where several artistic forms are merged into an integrated whole. To the ancients, nature itself was a total work of art, a symphony where wind, breath and spirit were the same concept. Water was flowing energy, alive with metaphysical force. The ancients could seamlessly take abstract concepts like spirit and energy and bestow upon them sensory qualities. These were minds imbibed with synesthesia, the natural blending of the senses. We can designate this as the first level of the Gesamtkunstwerk that we all possess instinctively. For better or worse, we’ve significantly lost this capability to the formalisms, compromises and distractions of modern society.

In many respects, the world of art attempts to recreate this primal synesthesia, and for those with interests in opera and architecture, the term Gesamtkunstwerk may be familiar. The term originates with the German architects of the Bauhaus movement in the early 1900s. Their goal was to create settings that fostered well-being through aesthetic and structural principles, integrated into everyday life (I find a powerful modern example in Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda at the Guggenheim). This principle has a strong connection to the modern applications of Feng Shui, an ancient Asian environmental art founded in nature. The Feng is wind and the Shui is water, manifestations of the flow of energy, symbols of balance and persistence, with each sensory element complementing another. We see in Feng Shui how ancient integration principles continue to flourish in modern society.

The Guggenheim Rotunda on Fifth Avenue

WAGNER AND THE RING CYCLE

But music is the most powerful force in the Gesamtkunstwerk, an abstract element that penetrates the supplest areas of the mind, igniting sensory qualities that capture our emotions. The German composer Richard Wagner argued for the quintessential art of the future where multiple elements of drama are accessed; mythology, poetry, costumes, spectacle, lighting, and the womb-like design of the theater, all integrated through highly orchestrated music. His greatest achievement was the Ring Cycle, a fifteen-hour opera saga based on Norse and Germanic legends, the rheingold (river gold) as a symbol of power, enlightenment and greed. Music combined with archetypical symbols of universal truths drive the unifying effect. Here in the prelude, music conveys the creation of nature.

Prelude to Das Rheingold

Wagner’s achievements were strengthened through the use of leitmotifs, signposts in music, that transform characters and drive ideas and emotions across narratives. Simply stated, the leitmotif is a musical concept that recurs and transforms, based on a character, a place, an object, or an abstract idea such as sacrifice or fate. While the concept dates back to ancient times in Mesopotamian, Chinese and Greek Drama, Wagner mastered the primordial power to bestow sensory qualities on objects or ideas through music. The theme of the rheingold is introduced here and returns many times in both glorifying and horrific iterations.

The Rheingold Leitmotif

HOLLYWOOD SCORES

Wagner died just before the invention of cinema, where the integration of sight, sound and narrative enabled the leitmotif to soar. Modern moviegoers are most familiar with the leitmotifs in films scored by John Williams, going back to Jaws and Star Wars in the 1970s and the more recent Harry Potter films. But perhaps the best example came from the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s. Franz Waxman’s Wagner-influenced score for the Bride of Frankenstein in 1936 is essential to the fantastical atmosphere of the film. He uses mainly two musical cues to reflect ideas that recur and transform throughout the film; the five note monster theme that repeats when the monster approaches or commits mayhem, and the three note bride cue, resurfacing years later in the form of Bali Hai in Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

The Bride of Frankenstein Soundtrack - Franz Waxman

We can especially appreciate his score during the creation scene where the high voltage cacophony of the machinery converts the music into heavy metal, less Wagner and more Metallica.

Creation Scene - Bride of Frankenstein

The sounds, images and rapid cutting is a prime demonstration of the Gesamtkunstwerk in cinema.

THE ROCK OPERA

During the great musical era that flourished in the 1960s, including rhythm and blues, soul, funk, country and rock, there were new experiments in the Gesamtkunstwerk aimed at a young, expansive commercial audience. Could the grinding treadmill that incentivized artists to create viral hits foster something greater, a rock opera? For the English group the Who and their creative leader Peter Townshend, the answer was Tommy. Just as Wagner had criticized what he viewed as the empty spectacle of his opera peers, Townshend rejected the demands of the hit machine and strove for transcendence in music. This was a story about a deaf, dumb and blind boy whose enhanced sensing of deep vibrations transforms him into a pinball wizard and eventually a messiah to impressionable teenagers, similar to the rock gods of his day. Tommy was an updated mythic figure; the Norse god re-created in the spirit of hyper-stimulated teenage angst. The primal synesthesia that was repressed by Tommy’s mother and lover forcing him to forget their murder of his father resurfaces in lightning rods of sensation, of which Townshend captures in the following compositions.

Amazing Journey - The Who

I'm Free - The Who

Whereas Wagner’s Ring Cycle quickly expands upward from the river depths of the inner mind to spectacular mythic visions, Townshend’s Tommy meticulously explores the inner psychological state, the primal world of suffering in a cave-like environment, until Tommy finally breaks free. The musical themes vacillate between these cationic inner states of vibration to outward states of spiritual freedom.

Townsend’s next pursuit was an extension of the rock opera with ideas on the fringe of science and technology, reaching for another peak in the total art form. His new libretto was called Lifehouse about a dystopian society that forces people to live in life-sustaining suits to protect them from an ecologically destroyed earth. By keeping the population isolated and thereby eliminating the source of the pollution, the hope is that nature will heal and the world will be saved. In many ways anticipating our current world, the “state” provides the stimulation for the population to survive in their cocoons, essentially deaf, dumb and blind without knowing it. But there’s an eventual uprising where teenage rebels surface their musical identities, represented in their own unique songs, eventually combined into a symphonic concert creating the unified, elusive, essential note.

Ultimately the concept was too challenging for his bandmates to comprehend, too difficult to execute and perhaps too advanced for its time, but the music assembled in this creative journey proved to be among the group’s best work. It was released as a stand-alone album called Who’s Next in 1971. When I go back and revisit these songs, I can detect a certain integration of themes, such as the “Teenage Wasteland” of Baba O’Riley and the “note pure and easy” sung in The Song is Over.

Baba O'Riley - The Who

The Song is Over - The Who

Persistent perfectionist that he was, Townshend kept the Lifehouse idea going, and as interactive technology advanced, he transformed his concept into an online venture. The Lifehouse Method was a computer program launched in 2007 by Townshend and a group of mathematicians and engineers that generated personalized music, processed from information an individual provided to the interface. The plan was to eventually play these individual “portraits” in a grand concert that combined all the pieces together into a cohesive harmony. Would this achieve another breakthrough in the evolution of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the elusive pure and easy note, the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, or as Townshend speculated the sound of the ocean? This is all still theoretical, for while over 10,000 portraits were created, the concert never occurred and the platform was closed in 2008.

WHERE CAN WE GO FROM HERE?

As I write a couple of decades later, the internet is flush with programs where AI can generate a personalized song for you upon offering up personal information and selecting a genre or a mood. These can be fun and diverting (and prompt extensive personalized marketing), but far from Wagner’s and Townshend’s visions of transforming the human species through its primal musical elements. Like the Bauhaus architects, I believe there’s great potential in exploring the power of the Gesamtkunstwerk in our everyday lives. Let’s be guided by all the phenomena explored above; our primal tendency towards synesthesia, the environmental principles of Feng Shui, Wagner’s trajectory from the building blocks of nature to the realm of the gods, Waxman’s fantastical film scores, and Townshend’s exploration of the inner mind’s ability to bend sensations into heightened levels of expression. These are all linked through the malleability of music and its abstractions.

Yes, this sounds fantastical, and we’re far from Wagner’s Valhalla and Townshend’s pinball wizards, but why leave this concept to the consumption of the arts? We can enrich our ourselves by incorporating personal leitmotifs into our daily lives. As we engage with the power of music throughout the day, we can use this concept to transform isolated building blocks into a cohesive whole. It can help us integrate various aspects of our life, whether work, relationships, dining, exercising, even dreams and goals, into a greater harmony. Our personal leitmotifs can become the conduit by where our inner psyche links outwardly with society. One can argue that the musical markers of our culture, from the one-hit wonders to the integrated musicals, are essentially historical, societal leitmotifs.

I propose establishing a “Leitmotif of the Day” or week or month or however often we can focus on a musical idea. These cues can train us to hear how rhythms, melodies, and pitches create a cultural and emotional resonance. They can rise up spontaneously from the environment like a song on the radio or be painstakingly selected through research, but the best approach may be establishing a healthy flow between random and pre-conceived influences. These musical cues may stir memories, dreams, nostalgia and yearnings, joyous or melancholic or painful. Contrasting a piece of music with others or transforming compositions from orderly melodies to improvisations or perhaps accenting them with polyrhythms may achieve the sensations Wagner and Townshend were after.

Let’s explore one simple demonstration with surf music. As summer ends, our relaxing time in the sun gives way to the pressures of intense work and study. The easy sway of Busting Surfboards thematically transforms to the driving electricity of Dick Dale’s Miserlou. Can contrasting these two styles within the same musical genre prepare us for the transition to the demanding, cluttered fall schedule?

Busting Surfboards - The Tornadoes

Miserlou - Dick Dale

I’ll also refer to a study I did a few weeks ago documenting the influence of the blues as a transforming societal leitmotif, musical signposts of America’s cultural evolution.

The Shakespeare Blues/American Rebirth Playlist #10

We’ll continue to explore the Gesamtkunstwerk and how we can better integrate the power of the arts emanating from the external world with our inner psychological states and vice-versa, gaining at least some new level of superintelligence. In the end, it’s mainly about the quest. Townshend set out to create Lifehouse but failed to reach that peak. Yet along the way he created some of the best music of his era. What new forms of music and art can we achieve if we aim this high?