jwilzewske: Marc Satterwhite: On Absolute Becoming and Quantum Passage

N ec est tamen, quod putes illos ignorare, quam cara res sit Tempus.
Vite solatium: iniqui temporis oblivio.

Do not believe that people are unaware how precious Time is;
Consolation of my life: the obliviousness of Unjust Time.”
— Petrarch, letter to Francesco Nello, 1353.

L a vita fugge, e non s’arresta una ora;
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate—
le cose presenti e le passate
mi danno guerra, e le future ancora.

Life flees and never rests one moment,
and death runs after it with mighty stride;
Present preoccupations and memories from the past
and things from the future, too, wage war on me.”
— Petrarch, Sonnet 272.

I know that this Marc Satterwhite composition references the famous Flor Garduño photos of the same title. But it troubles me that our sense of the word ‘witness’ is, in English, so passive and bystanderly. To see the score for this mystical cello piece or, better, to hear Paul York perform it, is to think of the word ‘witness’ in its sense as a verb … ‘witnessing’ as a way of actively, interventionally making something happen. Or, alternatively, actively forestalling it or keeping it at bay, containing it.

I do not think that I oversimplify if I say that much of Marc’s music grows out of traumatic experience, his understanding and integration of his emotional response to that experience and the humanity and deep spiritual nature of that response which is so perfectly expressed in his music. Many of these experiences involve loss; personal or shared. That certainly is reflected in the chamber works recorded here. ‘Epitafio’ is an achingly beautiful testament to the deep sadness that Marc felt for the deaths of the parents of a high school friend who were early mentors of his musical talents. ‘Witnesses of Time’ reflect in their starkness, dignity and unexpected joy the pain and delight he found in equal measure during the six years he lived in Latin America. Here snatches of indigenous melodies and rhythms are filtered though a modern sensitivity and given great emotional depth. ‘Memento Mori I’ reflects both of the types of loss mentioned. It manifests the powerful emotional reaction that Marc had to an interactive art exhibit of that name, commemorating the artist’s lost friends and loved ones and the sympathetic reaction it caused to his own continuing pain at the loss of his mother to suicide ten years before.”
— Ronald Grames.

T his is, in a very real way, a Satterwhite essay on the plasticity of time, on plurality of ‘worlds’, and on the possibility of ‘quantum personhood’ and ‘trans-world individuals’. The inspirations for what he has written here—and the superb renderering that Paul York gives the piece in performance—are dark.

T he exotic cello techniques constitute a gallery of ‘modal realism’—in the way that philosophers of language and mind use that phrase… ‘modal’, as in past-present-future modes.

T he limitations of our sense of time are extreme. The smallest interval that is perceptible to us is about 20 milliseconds, and the longest period is limited to a human lifetime, about 100 years. In nature, we know that the range is many orders of magnitude larger, both shorter and longer—from events at the atomic attosecond (10^-18 sec) scale: the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms; the time it takes for an atomic nucleus to recoil… to billions of years for the age of the Universe. But Nature and evolution did not equip us with senses or memory suitable to be aware of those timescales.

P etrarch regretted every one of his wasted moments. Witnessing time’s passage is always poignant; our own certain mortality and finiteness haunt us. This is not the End, but we can sort of see It from here.

T he speed and irreversibility of Time’s slipping away is inherent in the human condition, the cause for the poignancy. But Petrarch is all about himself, and about financial metaphors—‘rarity-value’ correlations, pearls vs. balsam—as though Time were an exchange-economy. As if. Petrarch commodifies Time and thinks of it as linear only, and those are bad moves, philosophically. There are many possibilities, including the possibility of branching space-time (see the cool little book by Le Poidevin, p. 191ff).

B ut Time has more fugacity [fleeingness] than any other substance ... its fugacity is infinite, unlike other physical things, solutes dissolving. So, following Petrarch’s implication, infinite fleeingness should entail infinite value, pricelessness?

F ew writers (Seneca; Husserl; Heidegger; Ricoeur; Adorno; a few others) have been as aware as Petrarch that time is inherent in poetry and music. Sonic art unfolds in duration; and the work once written bears and maintains an intimate relationship between the Past and the Future, dependent upon our gray-matter CPUs with their sub-MHz clocks and supra-attosecond/sub-century memories.

T he present address instantly becomes past, and the ego-tu in Satterwhite’s text/score addresses indefinite future audiences, as well as our future selves. Satterwhite’s causality is authorial, essayistic—where ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’ is not a logical fallacy but is instead Ultimate Truth.

S atterwhite [and ‘Witnesses’] refutes the Petrarchian idea that Time is linear and commodified. The cello engages in [quantum] communication with past and future events—sometimes on timescales within a bow-stroke or thumb-slap, sometimes on timescales very much longer. With such features, this clearly is not music to listen to at a great distance; indeed, it is a meditation that is best apprehended by the player himself/herself or by a friend sitting nearby. If live performance at close range is not an option, then this CD is a fine substitute, headphones on, suitably cranked up.

H inc sepe contingit, ut laudes eorum hominum, qui nobiscum vixerunt ignorantes, mira res dictu vetustissimorum certam notitiam habeamus. [It often happens that, while we are unaware of the praiseworthiness of people who are alive when we are, we amazingly have reliable knowledge of people from long ago.]

Witnesses of Time (Four studies on photographs by Flor Garduño)

Wounded Angel (San Antonio Aguas Calientes, Guatemala)
Tarahumara Pilgrimage (Norogáchic, México)
Threshold of Incense (Chichicastenango, Guatemala)
Tornado (Lake Titicaca, Bolivia)

T hese four movements were inspired by and named after photographs by Flor Garduño. Although Garduño’s work covers many themes, she is best known for her black-and-white documentaries of Latin American life, landscapes, and the human figure.

W ounded Angel’ depicts a Guatemalan Mayan Indian, holding a forlorn wooden statue of an angel sans right wing. The rhythmic structure of this movement—‘sees’ and then ‘raises’ the wager—the one that Flor had made with her photo—to the effect that even sacred icons are frail and require care and repair. Festinating ‘fits’ and ‘starts’ augment our sense of age, decrepitude, and alienation. The pensive mood of York’s cello weighs heavily on us.

T he ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’ photo shows a group dressed in their traditional paraphernalia, undertaking a procession that’s paradoxically, astonishingly, simultaneously transcendent and concrete. Some of the people carry drums, embodied in the percussive elements in this movement of the ‘Witnesses’ composition. There are violent pizzicati and sepulchral knocks on the cello belly and shoulder, but these do not draw attention to the performer or the composer; instead, they elegantly serve Satterwhite’s expressive purpose. Crucified cello is home inside but won’t come to the door just now. Strings damped, any sound played ‘short’ enough will be perceived as having no pitch—only the noise spectra of the attacks will be heard. Flesh, thumb-slaps, fingernail taps/trills, bowstick rattle against tender wood—the noises [confer humanity upon—/admonish us to regard the spirit of—] the box of the instrument—the wood itself—and reveal how unfair/pedestrian is our focus only on [transcendental] string-against-bowhair. The earthy box has its own dignity, without which cello pilgrimage would be impossible.

T hreshold of Incense’ is Garduño’s photo taken at the entry to the Santo Tomás Church in Chichicastenango, a culturally important Indian village in the Guatemalan high country. The scene shows smoke of incense mingling with morning fog, to the point where what is interpenetrating what is unclear. The breathy passages evoke meditation on the tenuousness of life; harp-like arpeggios explore an amazing scope of the cello’s colors. The instrument is unrepentant—defiant in its upper register. Listen, half-way expecting it to be apocalyptic: a cello [who] is, when played exactly in this way, Jacob’s Ladder. We perceive Satterwhite’s argument about ‘witness’, the verb, and about active, willful, quantum intervention to change the fabric of Time.

Paul York, near top of Jacob's Ladder, with cello; 12th-Century icon, St. Cahterine's Monastery, Sinai

T ornado’ captures a waterspout menacing Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, signifying nothing? Well, no. No more and no less, I suppose, than Corryvreckan signifies. Elaborating a series of unsettling, incongruous possible significands that are irresolvable, underdetermined. Existential chasm, transient, gaping, capricious, beautiful, fearsome. Musical aporia. There comes a moment when active quantum ‘witnessing’ and ‘becoming’ are done. At the end, we accept what is, utterly without recourse. We take our last breath. No more ‘becoming’. Laters.

W itnesses of Time’ was commissioned by and dedicated to Marc’s colleague at the University of Louisville School of Music, cellist Paul York, who premiered the work in 2004.

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Wounded Angel’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Tarahumara Pilgrimage’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Marc Satterwhite, Witnesses of Time, ‘Threshold of Incense’, 1.6MB MP3]

A mong the groups that have performed and recorded Marc’s works are the Boston Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Louisville Orchestra, Verdehr Trio, eighth blackbird, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Core Ensemble, Tales & Scales, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, London Composers’ Ensemble, and Percussion Group Falsa. Marc has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. A graduate of Michigan State University and Indiana University, he has taught in Texas, Indiana and Michigan and is Professor of Composition and Music Theory the University of Louisville School of Music where, in addition to teaching, he directs the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

T his Centaur disc has much to admire on it; sorry to abbreviate my comments just to the eponymous ‘Witnesses’ cello solo.

jwilzewske

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Marc Satterwhite: On Absolute Becoming and Quantum Passage

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