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Article Excerpt
Jan Klusak long ago won himself a firm place among the classics of Czech music of the later 20th Century. He is a remarkable man in many respects. As a musician he is a relatively unique case of a "pure" composer, who devotes himself only to composition rather than spreading his activities over other possible musical professions. Even so, he is a many-sided person: writer, journalist, film and theatre actor, astrologer ... Since November 1989 he has even been taking a more conspicuous role in public life.
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The author of a book on Klusak, Ivan Polednak, would probably aphoristically sketch Klusak as follows: "The descendant of poor plebeian Czechs and affluent Jews hit by the Holocaust. An heir to the traditions of "Czech national music" (Klusak has a great and humble admiration for the works of Smetana) and also heir to the distinctive traditions of the "Czech-German-Jewish-Prague" culture symbolised by names like Rilke, Kafka, Brod, Meyrink, Werfel, Kisch, and Schulhoff. These are apparently very disparate areas full of internal paradoxes, and perhaps that is one reason why Klusak's own music is so characteristically esoteric. On the other hand, he has also written fully functional music for the mass TV serial Hospital on the Edge of Town. Klusak honours spiritual values, but also enjoys succumbing to bodily temptations. He is a man of remarkable vitality and strong health who refuses to engage in sport on principle. He is a composer working in a strictly rational style, but at the same time he believes in a magic power that rules the world, life and creativity. Klusak is someone who never flirted with the communist regime and who even today does not let his political attitudes overshadow his vocation as an artist. Klusak is a person who avoids public jostling for position, grandeur and pomp--but at the same time shows extraordinary toughness and principle in public matters and in matters of artistic integrity. He is an individual par excellence, the opposite of a "herd animal", but a man who has no yen to publicly stand out above the others either. Instead he is unshowy and inconspicuous, convinced that what makes a person into a man of stature is above all his work, what he demonstrably knows how to do and what he has achieved." In matters of music Klusak is admirably serious, admirably sober and tolerant, as will soon be apparent. In ordinary communications he has a wonderfully personal sense of humour. As with all deeply educated and many-sided people, an interview with Jan Klusak is an intellectual treat sui generis. I am delighted to have had the opportunity to talk to him in what is a personal jubilee year (he celebrated his seventieth birthday on the 18th of April).
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Let's start this interview with the present. How does a seventy-year-old feel in a contemporary musical world of which he is still a part?
I live my life these days thinking mainly about the fundamental thing that art should be about. Recently it was formulated very well by the poet Miloslav Topinka, who published a poetic composition Trhlina [The Crack] (and won the Seifert Prize for it). It is one long poem divided into small parts. What Topinka constantly emphasises (and not only in this poem, but in various interviews) is the Rimbaudian (but also for example Holanian) attempt to get via art beyond some frontier, as it were to "break through" into some other dimension, to get through that "crack in the heavens" somewhere beyond this reality. Of course this can't last long, or at least can't last forever. It is something like a mystical state: either you stay there for good, and have die there too, or else you come back to this world. I would like this interview of ours to be based on that idea, because it seems to me that music has three basic stages of development. First monophony, then polyphony, which music essentially lived by up to the 20th century, and then modern music, which has been as it were striving for some kind of self-transcendence, as if it wanted yet to change its state again and become a kind of "radiance" or better still "radiation outwards". But this has only been achieved in a few exceptional cases. In my view Vares has managed it in some of his works, for example, or Boulez or Stockhausen--but let me emphasise that it is very exceptional even with them.
Only the shift from monophony to polyphony meant first and foremost a complication of the texture, while in my view that quality of a "new state" in 20th-century music isn't comparable to that previous development. Modern music is still polyphonic or a type of polyphonic structure on the same level. So the transformation must have happened (or be happening) on some different level.
You're right. One feature common to monophony and polyphony was a kind of linear development in time. What is new in 20th-century music has brought--or been striving to bring--a halt to this time movement in music, as it were, exchanging the progression for radiation from a point, emanation. This is movement as well, but of a completely different quality.
But the radiation was certainly present in monophony as well. Gregorian chant had it almost in its job description. And so it probably can't be considered the distinguishing mark of music in the "post-polyphonic stage".
Once I studied Gregorian chant quite intensively and it struck me that it might be possible to create a kind of dense polyphony by linking up many melodies of Gregorian chant together. I tried this in my electronic piece O sacrum convivium--which is an antiphony on Corpus Christi.
Would it not then be possible...
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