jwilzewske: Stories of Water Falling: Forestalled Closure, Meta-Stories, and Monumental Uses of Silence

T hou still-unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggles to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
— John Keats, 1819, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Stanza 1.

I ’ve received quite a few emails recently concerning the several CMT posts that have appeared in the past several months about time and meter (links below). Thank you, to each of you who has shared your ideas.

M ost of these emails have been responses by way of examples illustrating how a particular pattern or figure can make us feel, either as performers or as listeners. Just yesterday I received an email from a composer who especially recommended the recent book by Martin Boykan, Silence and Slow Time, for its scope and insightfulness on these topics. I ordered a copy.

M eanwhile, though—while awaiting the Boykan book’s arrival—I’ve been enjoying Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s book on poetics—and listening to some recordings of Boykan’s pieces performed by Pro Arte Quartet.

Reading poems silently and aloud involves [at least] two separate dimensions of understanding. Reading music silently and playing it, likewise at least two dimensions. Unless we accept that ‘reading-silently-to-onesself’ and ‘performing-a-reading’ create [different] tensions and ambiguities that can only be resolved by our control of both experiences, we fail, I think, to understand how the texts really ‘work’.

It is fascinating to do—to read music without performing it or listening to it performed. It’s sad that not many regular people do this anymore. In the olden days, even amateur musicians used to do it to some extent. These days, mostly it is professionals. Why is this? People read words, read books without always speaking the words aloud. To not do this with music forecloses a whole world of imagination.

Narrative, when we engage it silently, has far different rhythms than narrative when it unfolds in performance. The succession of events, the ‘shape’ that they have as we perceive them, and the prominence of some details—chord progressions, melodic figures—and the deemphasis of others ... are tremendously different when we perform them (or listen to a performance), compared to when we read them silently. When we are in control, reading silently, our minds can make time dilate and contract. Our minds can keep and remember phrases or tokens of moments-just-past and continue attending to them, with a vividness and persistence that are greater than (and qualitatively different from—) how things are when we are performing the piece or listening to it.

Those things affect the way time appears to flow. Boykan’s ‘Echoes of Petrarch’ plays on my CD player. I am wishing I had the score in front of me…

How can we be sure that our “way of thinking [about music] … is faithful to the experience of playing or listening during a real performance” as Boykan recommends? How can we be certain our understanding resembles the composer’s act of composition?

According to the publisher’s blurb on the webpage where I ordered the book, Boykan “proposes a diachronic mode of musical analysis that considers not only the function of musical details but also the temporal location of such details. He contrasts his diachronic mode of analysis with a synchronic view of music whereby a composition is understood as a spatial object, something outside of time that we can perceive all at once.”

So I will try to project myself into a frame of mind that is faithful to this Boykan ‘Echoes’ piece by focusing my attention on its stream of events and their transformations and developments in musical time, to see what narrative emerges. Maybe certitude will emerge from that game.

Or not. The ‘Echoes’ has pauses and silences that defeat any attempts to conclude anything. It has trochaic pulses after the silences, sudden enough to stun. It is beautiful in its uncertainty, because of its uncertainty.

Boykan’s music … is ‘ekphrastic’. Its rhythmic silences and ‘whitespace’ illuminate the liveliness of the notes. Like a painting of a sculpture: the ‘Echoes of Petrarch’ composition is a ‘telling the story of’ its subject, and so—as Boykan becomes a storyteller, and as we follow the story—we hear the composition as a story (work of art) itself, as well as a story-about-a-story. A meta-story, a meta-compostion.

In this way, the composition re-presents reality, or Boykan’s expansive account of what he imagines that reality to have been—a sort of ‘notional ekphrasis’. One art work depicting another work of art that is still a ‘work-in-progress’ or, in this case, a reality that is not entirely knowable since the historical evidence is incomplete. …The distorted faces in a 14^th Century Italian crowd; a composition essaying particularly dark aspects of Petrarch’s 14^th Century Italian society—an ekphrasis built up, not with silences or pauses as strategic ‘punctuation’ or mechanical ‘fasteners’ merely, but instead as positive, load-bearing architectural elements.

In his analogy one silence form shares its own quietude—with all its shortcomings—with that of the ideal form, or template. A third class of quietude, too, may share the ideal form. He continues with the fourth form also containing elements of the ideal template/archetype which in this way remains an ever-present yet supremely inaudible ideal version with which the virtuosic silence-artist compares his work. As quietude after quietude shares the ideal form and template of all creation of silences, each quietude is associated with another ad infinitum, a Platonic ‘infinite regress of forms’.

Steven Feld’s ethnomusicological study of the Kaluli in Papua, New Guinea, showed that gulu or metric flow preserves continuity across silences and changes in meter. When the meter is choppy or there are gaps or silences then the Kaluli use the word kubu to refer to it. It is said to mimic irregular water-splashing sounds like when water falls over rocks. The Kaluli use the terms fo and bu to denote pulsating and interconnected quality of water rushing over rocks. A ritardando followed by an accelerando / a tempo is called golo, and denotes an eddy. Fasela and sob are terms they use to refer to places where their music mimics the rhythmic patterns of a benign, even-flowing waterfall. Don’t know what they call music that mimics killer Class VI rapids or malignant waterfalls...

Of course, waterfalls do not have rhythmic closure, except maybe on a geologic time-scale. Their harmonic cadences have a periodicity, but it is a sort that is normally only perceptible if you are patient enough to wait—possibly for many minutes or hours. Boykan seems to be very patient. Slow-time, he says...

Waterfall, comprised of jillons of H2O molecular artists perfrming on del Gesù rocks, not objecting to the conductorly, improvisational decisions of Gravity

There is an ekphrasis in the visual aspect of water-flow narrative / what-happens-to-water-happens-in-music. For the Kaluli people, ‘sob’ with mm = 120 denotes a continuous shimmering under the power of gravity. Spatial, atemporal, Boykanian silences intercalated with shimmering-water, propelled by the certitude of eternal gravity.

Feld shows how the ecology of natural sounds is central to a local musical ecology, and how this musical ecology maps onto the rainforest environment. For songs and weeping not only recall and announce spirits, their texts, sung in a poetry called "bird sound words", sequentially name places and co-occurring environmental features of vegetation, light and sound. Songs become what Kaluli call a ‘path’, namely a series of place-name tokens that link the cartography of the rainforest to the stories of its past and present inhabitants. These song-paths are also linked to the Kalulis’ spirit world of birds, whose flight patterns weave through trails and water courses, connecting a spirit cosmology above to local human histories below.

These gestures are all of a ritual, testimonial sort—rehearsing and reinforcing how the members of the culture should regard the world, how they should conceive of the cosmos. There is a monumental quality to them, one that defends against the ravages of aging and mitigates the fact of individual death. We get more of this in Keats’s ‘Fall of Hyperion’, of course... Frozen gods, eternal quietude, beyond the passage of cyclical time, old marble ever-beautiful.

W hat if the composer’s problem is precisely that she/he does not know what one should say at a particular spot. What if silence and certitude are both equally impossible? The expectation of certitude reflects the cultural flip-side of the cultural craving for deferral of judgment and affirming uncertainty as beautiful. When certitude can be assumed or is obvious, then it needn’t be announced. But in an age where beliefs are unreliable, “militant fideism will be as characteristic as desperate scepticism,” as Barbara Herrnstein Smith says.

M artin Boykan (born 1931) studied composition with Walter Piston, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, and piano with Eduard Steuermann. He received a BA from Harvard University, 1951, and an MM from Yale University, 1953. In 1953-55 he was in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship, and upon his return founded the Brandeis Chamber Ensemble. In 1964-65, he was the pianist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Boykan is currently the Irving G. Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University. He has been Composer-in-Residence at the Composer’s Conference in Wellesley and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University, NYU, and Bar-Ilan University. Boykan has written for a wide variety of instrumental combinations including 4 string quartets, a concerto for large ensemble, many trios, duos and solo works, song cycles for voice and piano as well as voice and other instruments, and choral music. His symphony for orchestra and baritone solo was premiered by the Utah Symphony in 1993. His work is widely performed and has been presented by ensembles including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the New York New Music Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the League-ISCM, Earplay, Musica Viva and Collage New Music.

Amazon says the Boykan book will arrive on Saturday. I am looking forward to what is sure to be [an ekphrastic, poetical] meta-composition about composing. Gotta love his appropriation of Keats’s ode for his title...

jwilzewske

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Stories of Water Falling: Forestalled Closure, Meta-Stories, and Monumental Uses of Silence

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