S hort motifs predominate... any feeling of meter is, basically, ‘local’. The majority of sections are only 8 bars long, with strong downbeat emphasis. Each section/variation offers new and different kinds of transparency, some more arpeggiated, some less so. The music may be Irish and Scottish in origin, but through this 2-hour recital I am drawn more than anything toward comparisons with Indian ragas—evolutions of a series of waves progressing over the ocean’s surface for hundreds of miles.
C omparisons with other kinds of minimalist music, a la La Monte Young, Reich, Nyman, Riley, and others seem apt as well.
I n Savall’s conception of the Scottish folk tune ‘MacPherson’s Lament’, the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. [The prisoner condemned to die requested the privilege to play one last tune, and this is the tune that he performed. Many fast trills, initiated on downbeat and then tapering—little symbolisms of trembling, waning life. After finishing the last note, the prisoner smashed the fiddle: the fiddle would die with him, a second homicide, violating the personhood of the instrument and compounding whatever other crimes MacPherson may have committed.]
T here are surely many musicians who have continued playing up to within a short while before their deaths, usually from cancer or other chronic illness. Consider the gesture as a form of palliative self-care. This is terminal abjection. The music is not meant to be salvific or curative, like a Tarantella! The musician knows full-well that s/he is about to die, and that there will be no reprieve, no escaping this fate. If anything, we hear a brave, dignified aesthetic of fast-approaching doom. [Did Shackleton’s Expedition have amateur musicians abord, I wonder? If so, what did they play toward The End?] All told, the repertoire of those whose lives are ended by the State must be a very small and specialized one. Savall’s performance suggests that jewish musicians of the Theresien (Terezin) Holocaust prison camp do not have a world monopoly on this literature. But I digress.
T he feature of the Jordi Savall-Paul O’Dette-Shane Shanahan performance last night that most fascinated me was the minimalism of it—and how this music (which is ordinarily performed in a freewheeling, raucous manner—at noisy dances with liberal imbibing, lots of stomping and shouting and carrying-on) resembles error-correcting codes in communications and software. The intermittent loss of phase-lock (due to signal attenuation, or multi-path reflections and other interference, or fluctuating changes in signal-to-noise ratio in the communications channel) in ballads and dance music is rapidly detected, the parts (treble viol in Jordi’s lap; Paul’s cittern/lute; Shanahan’s bodhran) are de-skewed, and phase-lock is recaptured, in large part due to the structure of these low-entropy framing “packets”, these 8-bar phrases.
H ave a look at Prof. Hartmut Obendorf’s recent computer science book (link below) to see what I mean.
I wish that Paul O’Dette and Shane Shanahan had had more substantial parts to play during the Celtic Viol concert last night, parts more illustrative of their expressiveness and musicianship. But despite their relegation to low-key ‘accompaniment’ roles, O’Dette and Shanahan seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal on-stage. Accompanists manifest a unique dignity arising from modesty, nurturing, and support—another species of minimalism, I suppose, providing the ‘canvas’ for the soloist’s artistic vision. It was all pretty cool.
T he Jasper String Quartet gave an outstanding performance this past Tuesday at Oberlin College. JSQ is J. Freivogel (violin), Sae Niwa (violin), Sam Quintal (viola), and Rachel Henderson Freivogel (cello). They won the silver medal at the 2009 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and have recently served as graduate quartet-in-residence at the Yale School of Music. They are just now beginning a residency at Oberlin this Fall.
T heir accounts of Schubert’s Quartettsatz in C minor (D. 703) [the first movement of a 12th string quartet that was uncompleted before Schubert’s death] and the Beethoven “Razoumovsky” quartet (Op. 59, No. 3) were both strong and received enthusiastic applause from those who attended in the nearly sold-out, packed hall.
T he work that especially captivated me, though, was Aaron Jay Kernis’s String Quartet No. 2, which I’d never heard before. This was composed by Kernis in 1996-1997 and won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 when he was only 38 years old.
[45-sec clip #1, Lark String Quartet, Aaron Jay Kernis, String Quartet No. 2, second movement (sarabande), 1998, 1.4MB MP3]
[50-sec clip #2, Lark String Quartet, Aaron Jay Kernis, String Quartet No. 2, second movement (sarabande), 1998, 1.6MB MP3]
T he 17-minute-long sarabande progresses at a slow tempo at first, intense but with a smooth surface, not unlike Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (second movement of String Quartet, Op. 11, which Barber composed at age 26). Later on there are faster passages that are often dense and dissonant, wailing. The result is a predominantly complex texture, relieved by intermittent solo passages. At around the 12-minute mark in Tuesday’s JSQ performance of the Kernis sarabande, a fff unison passage tugged at our heartstrings and ultimately broke them. After this the viola and cello solo resumed a more modest, contained, controlled grieving.
L ike Barber’s Adagio, Kernis’s orchestration in this quartet has tense intertwined voice-leading in each part. Like Barber’s Adagio, after the violent bits, we are recovered by the low strings who bring us in for some sort of a [dramatic, wounded] landing.
A nd, like Barber’s Adagio, there is something ‘archaic’ about the rhetorical structure of Kernis’s sarabande—the relentless, rhapsodic, pneumatic phrasing rising to the climax, then fading into silence. This gradual build-up and slow release of tension—the classic “arch” form—we know this; we recognize what it is doing to us; we cannot resist the viceral, physiologic, primitive effects it has on us.
I f at first we didn’t understand what the quartet’s first movement means, this devastating second movement leaves no doubt, and it provides context for the third movement. The whole construction provides sonic symbolic proof of the permanence that’s within us, as contrasted with the violence and transience of the outer reality.
I nstead of the long melody, our emotions get shortened to just four notes. Finally, the notes slow down, twice as slow. We can't emote any longer. Then we hear that final note for a split second, and then that chord is taken as the only possible resolution. We would have never dreamed that this is where acceptance lies. The whole piece has just been reduced to just those two chords. The simplicity of the logic makes you feel the universality of the journey: from the simple note, to the high emotional wailing, to release and to final acceptance, but never the place you thought it was going to lead you to.” — Rob Kapilow, remarks on Barber’s Adagio, NPR, 09-MAR-2010.
K ernis prepared this work as a personal, individual elegy in 1997, but he has subsequently commented on the significance that this quartet and his later arrangement of it for string orchestra have for him in the light of the events of 9/11. The vehemence of the quartet might seem over-the-top for personal mourning of one individual—well, maybe not if the loss were a child or a spouse or belovèd parent. But it is definitely not excessively vehement for collective, public mourning. In that respect, too, this Kernis quartet sarabande movement resembles Barber’s Adagio.
E legy’s peculiar characteristic is a tender and querulous idea... and so long as this is thoroughly sustained, admits of a variety of subjects; which by its manner of treating them it renders its own. It throws its melancholy stole over different objects, which, like dresses at a funeral procession, gives them all a kind of solemn and uniform appearance.” — William Shenstone, 1768.
T here’s a moment in the midst of the sarabande when everything changes. Photographers experience this routinely—if you miss the moment, if you blink or don’t see it coming, or if you fail to press the shutter release during the fraction of a second before the change hits, it is gone forever. It feels like our calculus of the future was incomplete or faulty. We who are grieving evidently hadn’t previously appreciated adequately how transient each of us is. We had thought that, if we could just be heroic enough, we might save the person who is now gone. We feel that we have failed. Further, we who are grieving previously imagined that we were the authors of our own lives, and only just now dimly recognize that our selves have in fact been the project of the other person and many others. This profound lack of control shocks us. The evidence is incompatible with our previous beliefs.
I t’s a strange relationship we have with objects that belonged to the dead—in the ‘knit’ of their atoms, their touch is left behind.” — Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces.
W e painfully discover that we have been inscribed by the person every bit as much as her/his left-behind objects. We find that we are like ornately carved netsuke, with through-and-through holes in us that have been burrowed and whittled by years of relationship, and we are shocked to find that only just now do we realize this. How could we have been so blind and stupid!
T he precursor to grief is always ‘connection’. We do not grieve that which we have merely appreciated or admired... Anticipatory grief is like being in a small sailboat in a storm at sea. The turbulence and unpredictability have to be dealt with, and they are not under your control... You will not be able to do everything you want to do to help your dying loved one. Give what you can, as creatively as you can, and then forgive yourself for not being able to do more. Your sense of helplessness does not mean you have failed.” — Donna Davenport, Singing Mother Home, pp. 114, 119, 131.
W e naïvely imagined that we were in charge of something that has clearly escaped our mastery’s grasp. And the true nature of elegy seems to have escaped us as well. Elegy is supposed to be a way to arrive at some sort of solace or closure at times of loss. That’s its aim, its overt purpose, and, as a result, elegiac texts are ‘complicit’ in the effects of the ‘pageant’ that they also analyze. By design, elegies are transcendence portals. We had thought that we would have a choice; we thought that we would enter a portal of elegy under our own power, when we decided the time was right, deliberately. Here, time is compressed, and we find that the portal opens up and swallows us. We may not fight it; we may go along with it. But the involuntariness of being transported emotionally like this shocks us.
T he very notion of time compressed requires something like elegiac machinery to decompress it.” — David Rigbee, Styles of Ruin, p. 150.
W hen we hear elegiac music (or elegiac poetry, or other art forms) that leads us to realize this, it is natural to say that it was ‘moving’ or ‘dramatic’ or ‘powerful’. Understatement, to say the least. Life-changing? Maybe. Frankly, words simply fail. Which I suspect may have something to do with why this quartet won Kernis a Pulitzer.
S omehow, Kernis keeps this sarabande balanced—keeps the whole 3-movement work balanced. It is his lamentation; he, the composer, and his emotions are his own subject. It is devilishly difficult to build up a convincing account of grief and to sustain it authentically when you yourself are the subject. Over the centuries, there has been lots of bad elegiac poetry that fails because it couldn’t achieve or sustain balance. Yet Kernis delivered it, and the Jasper String Quartet delivered it as well in their beautiful performance.
T he piece is not merely beautiful to listen to or merely emotionally moving. On Tuesday night it became for me a miraculous elegy machine—one whose elegant mechanics are beautiful to hear and see and admire as they move. Through its transparent exterior, we see how this tugging at our heartstrings works. It struck me a bit like procedural [conscious] sedation, with digital video so we patients can see and hear most everything the doctor is doing while she/he operates on us. This ability even to experience the mechanics of what we are experiencing while we are experiencing it is radical, disorienting, uncanny, unsettling, very dramatic.
S ome structural/mechanical things that I noticed while listening... Widely-spaced blocks of short and long passages have the effect of distancing the mourner from the subject (death; the idea of death); they place the traumatic event far enough away to re-present and reevaluate it.
W hat is the truth of the ninety-year old woman waiting for me at the house, who is changed beyond recognition and yet who is still my mother? ... It has taken me years to learn that reality is far more than meets the human eye, or ear, or mind... The Greeks have a word for this realness of things... ’ousia’ [οὐσία].” — Madeleine L’Engle, 1984, p. 49.
O ut of sight, out of mind? Not really. The recollection-at-a-distance through these passages has instead the effect of maintaining the mind’s focus on the event, albeit at arms’ length. The phrases that hark back to earlier ones—the canon-type transferring of a phrase from one part to others—lend a backward-reaching intimacy to the experience of this Quartet. Since the thing recalled is always longing for yet another future recollection, the phrases that look backward look forward as well. Kernis throws an ‘arch’ forward, and the performers (and we) face our own future, with some species of hope, as we simultaneously reflect on the departed or the about-to-depart.
K ernis’s chain of phrases is like a chain of rhymes. Often the second or third one is slightly imperfect or impatient—humanly so, as if for reasons of human frailty. In some places, one of the four lines can’t wait and urgently adds what it must say, interjecting what it must—earlier than we might think it should, were it observing the civilities of normal quartet discourse. Or, say, in other cases one of the four lines is unexpectedly delayed. The imperfections are a poetical sign that things are far from ‘normal’; mourning in extremis. Shocking.
T he ‘chiasmus’, the marching along of melodically and rhythmically similar lines and similar bowing, go relentlessly toward some kind of apotheosis, which arrives in the third movement. The dramatic power of the second movement substantially derives from the emulation of controlled pausing and breathing, and stretches where grief causes the loss of control. The phrases are like lines in a poem, built up into stanzas. The mourner’s pain is compacted into the pneumatics of breathing, much as we feel in the elegies of Milton or Keats or Shelley.
T he ‘breathing’ of the quartet members’ bows involves drawing them and expending their length in multiple, pained, successive stresses. There are series of eighth-notes that suggest what would be ‘transitive’ participles if this quartet had lyrics: com-pell-ing, de-spair-ing. Other series’ accents suggest defiantly ‘intransitive’ participles: ach-ing, burst-ing. The latter—diffuse and not referring to anything done-to or done-by—evoke a persisting existential ‘melancholia’ more than an event-driven ‘melancholy’. Song without words!
A Romantic-period elegist would have been a ‘confident’ visionary—would have served up a confident, strong mourner. Here in Kernis’s No. 2 quartet we have anguish and insurmountable tentativeness as well as unabashed outrage at the loss. In fact, the multidimensional mixture of pastoral, confessional, romantic, and modern underscores the visceralness and urgency of the quartet. This in turn reinforces how authentic we perceive this quartet’s expressions to be.
A t times, grieving for a loved one begins considerably before the end of life, premonition of the impact of high-velocity bullets. Each setback in the loved one’s health triggers an emotional reaction in us—one that feels like a shot from a gun, a cannon even: explosive anxiety; 2,800 foot-per-second ballistic sadness; projectile vulnerability. Each fleeting recovery reloads the chamber and cocks the trigger of the testamentary gun again. Kernis’s quartet does this repeatedly, this ‘anticipatory’ grieving.
W ith the impending loss of the loved one, a weird, horrific beauty unfolds—the unstoppable specifics of the events, the terribleness of the muzzle, the abjectness and universality of the ordeal and time. Stomachs in knots, we discover that we are owned by our relationship, by our caring. We comprehend as if for the first time the 'accidentalness' of who we each are—ourselves and the loved one. There is no conceivable relief from these realizations.
A ccording to modern convention in Western society, grieving is supposed to be orderly and not too long. ‘Acceptance’ is the goal; anything less is ‘incomplete’, a deficiency for which the griever is blameworthy. ‘Moving on’ and reinvesting emotional energy in new attachments are the evidence of healthy completion or closure of the grieving process.
T o many grievers, though, these social norms feel wrong, coercive, impossible to comply with. The norms threaten to deprive us of our right to grieve, at the very moment when we are losing (or have recently lost—) the loved one. The outrage in the ascending passages of the second movement of Kernis’s second quartet seems directed against this normative social violence against grievers...
D enial; bargaining; and what follows. Kübler-Ross was the first or one of the first to identify anger as a ‘stage’ in the process of preparing for death. I am reminded of this at the 12-minute mark in the Kernis quartet No. 2 sarabande. When we see a loved one hurting, it’s natural to feel waves of protective anger, protesting what is happening and the harm that is occurring. Guilt and regret are often mixed in—when the loved one’s condition keeps getting worse despite everything you are doing to prevent that, or when you have to override their objections and take away their car keys or place them in a nursing home.
J ane and I] went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as ‘Gilgamesh’... Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.” — Donald Hall, The Best Day the Worst Day, 2006, p. 118.
T hey wept and affirmed their love for each other, witlessly, over and over again. When it snowed one morning Jane gazed at the darkness blurred with flakes. They pushed the I.V. pump which she called Igor slowly past the nurses' pods, as far as the outside door so that she could smell the snowy air.” — Donald Hall, ‘Her Long Illness’, Without, 1999.
U ltimately, near the end, when you are with the loved one for long periods of time and when there is little change of facial expression and almost no communication, we feel alienation, not only from the loved one and the relationship we have shared, but also from ourselves. We lose our bearings and part of our own identity. The face of the other is no longer functioning as a ‘mirror’ of ourselves. Kernis and JSQ elegantly lead us to this simple but important insight. You may be interested to read Chapter 6 of W. David Shaw’s book. The chapter is entitled ‘Does Good Grief Therapy Make Good Art? The Paradox of Strong and Weak Mourners’ (link below).
F or me, the basic source from which all my work flows is a belief in the inexhaustible number of things music can do—its ability to spring from the inexhaustibility of the thoughts and emotions of human beings.” — Aaron Jay Kernis, interview with Joshua Kosman, Strings Magazine, JUL-1999.
I t’s elegiac and mournful and pleading and screaming for so long, and then comes redemption. He builds you up and then creates a release that’s so moving, you don’t realize that the time has gone by. I recognized that from the audience reaction—you can feel that they’re not breathing [while you play], and that’s really good. People only realize afterward that it’s not a short piece—it’s 30 minutes long. But it has such incredible line, and the intensity doesn’t let up for a second. So you’re hanging on every note, waiting to see what happens. That element of suspense is a very unusual compositional technique.” — Aaron Jay Kernis, interview with Joshua Kosman, Strings Magazine, JUL-1999.
M y mouth gets incredibly dry when I sing. Are there any new things to try out there? A gel I tried once felt greasy in my mouth, so that was the end of that. And sprays I’ve tried only last about 10 minutes.” — Anonymous email to CMT.
T he short duration of action you experienced with the sprays isn’t unusual. You need to remember that any extraneous material in the mouth tends to induce reflexive/habitual motions (of tongue, etc.) to remove it and clear it out. Products that would have a longer duration of action for regular people just sitting around and not talking or singing may not last so long for you during a vocal performance. Years ago, I used to take care of cancer patients, both immediately after radiation treatment and later in palliative care, so I do know something about the strengths and limitations of the ‘artificial saliva’ products that are available.
S ubjective dry mouth sensation is known as xerostomia. But when sialometry (performed by a physician immunologist or laryngologist) objectively demonstrates a saliva flow rate of under 0.2 mL/min (resting salivation rate) and under 0.7 mL/min (stimulated salivation rate), the fancy medical terms ‘hyposialia’, ‘sialopenia’, or ‘salivary hyposecretion’ are used—basically, saliva production less than 500 mL of saliva a day, against ‘normal’ losses of saliva to (mouth-open breathing-related) evaporation and ordinary swallowing of saliva: a deficient production compared to normal losses.
L ow saliva not what the question above was about, though. The question has mostly to do with increased evaporative losses associated with large minute-wise airflow for singing, against ‘normal’ saliva flow rates that are unable to keep up with the rate of loss. In some cases, the dry mouth may be exacerbated by stage fright or allergies or medications you might be taking or a health condition that causes the mouth to be dry. But, for many singers, it’s just the mismatch between the (modest-but-normal) rate of saliva production and the (singing-accelerated) rate of saliva loss.
T he artificial saliva material may not only migrate down the throat into the esophagus, but also (in small amounts) into the larynx. So with regard to singing, please be sure to try out whatever solution you are planning to use in advance—in rehearsals long before any public performance. You don’t want to do anything radically new or un-tested on-stage.
D ry mouth is treated with liquid or gel artificial saliva solutions that are designed so that they will be retained on the mucosal surfaces for a period of some tens of minutes at least, to provide lubrication. These solutions contain bioadhesive polymers (chains that range from a few thousand Daltons molecular weight up to about 100 KDa MW), often sodium carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC). Some newer ones have an oxygenated glycerine tri-ester (TGO) active ingredient. Most of these have a rather slippery/sticky ‘mouth-feel’, but are well worth a try.
G ellan gum and alginate also both form mucoadherent gels, albeit by a different mechanism (ionic strength of moisture at physiologic mucosal surface) than the others. There are a few over-the-counter products that have these as their active ingredients.
G el-based artificial saliva products have traditionally been more effective and last longer than ‘spray’ type artificial salivas. This has been extensively studied in palliative-care patients, especially terminal cancer. But there are some mucin-mimicking artificial saliva products that have been introduced just in the last two years that have performed well in clinical trials.
P oloxamers in 2% w/v to 5% w/v solutions are liquids at room temperature but gel at body temperature, once they are applied inside the mouth.
T he polyvinylpyrrolidone polymer within an anionic polymer solution (Oasis®) enables higher concentrations of mucoadhesive polymer than older products achieve. These PVP copolymer films stay ‘stuck’ to the mouth tissues for longer, while at the same time giving improved mouth-feel due to reduced slippery/sticky mouth-feel, compared to carboxymethylcellulose (CMC)-based artificial saliva products. I have tried Oasis® and think it works very well.
N ote that the Oasis® spray does not have poloxamer in it. You can use as required, up to a maximum of 60 sprays per day. Each application of the Oasis® mouthwash lasts about 2 hours; each application of the Oasis® spray keeps your mouth feeling moist for, at most, 60 min or so. The Oasis® mouthwash would probably work better for a singer performing longer concerts. (Supposedly, Mariah Carey uses MouthKote® spray…)
T alk to your retail pharmacist. Those with training in clinical pharmacy are well prepared to advise you on the pros and cons of the various products. Some pharmacies don’t stock these products, or have a small selection since it’s a low-volume type of item, used by relatively few patients. So you may have to look for mail-order options. The hyperlinks embedded in this CMT post will give you a few options you can check out.
O r talk to your dentist. With the exception of palliative medicine physicians, oncologist physicians, ENT physicians, immunologist physicians and some gerontologists, most physicians have little experience with dry mouth and are not expert in managing it. Dentists are, in general, very knowledgeable about OTC and prescription approaches to treating dry mouth. In the U.S., artificial saliva products are regulated by FDA CDRH as Class II 510(k) dental medical devices, not as drugs.
S ome products (like Salivese®, Glandosane®, BioXtra®, and Salivix®) are only licensed for dry mouth due to radiotherapy or Sjogren’s Syndrome and require a prescription. You don’t have to have one of those ‘on-label’ conditions to get a prescription for these. A physician or dentist could legally write a prescription for you (‘off-label’). But you would have to explain to them what your performing activity entails, and why you need a powerful artificial saliva—get them to understand why other things have not been adequately effective for you and why you therefore would like to try a prescription for one of these ‘heavier-duty’ artificial saliva products.
Escobar-Chavez J, et al. Applications of thermo-reversible pluronic F-127 gels in pharmaceutical formulations. J Pharm Pharmaceut Sci 2006; 9:339-58.
Furamoto E, Barker G, Carter-HAnson C, Barker B. Subjective and clinical evaluation of oral lubricants in xerostomic patients. Spec Care Dent 1998; 18: 113-18.
Y ou know, you are mistaken in the translation of this Khlebnikov poem. ‘When they are dying, horses feel profoundly relieved / When they are dying, shrubberies become sad / When they are dying, suns cease to shine / When they are dying, men sing’ is a more apt rendering of the sense of the Russian. Your ‘When horses die, they breathe / When grasses die, they wither / When suns die, they go out / When people die, songs are sung’ is badly wrong. Seriously in error. Every line. You should fix it. Otherwise, schmexy.” — M. Vladov, email to CMT.
A very interesting point. The CMT post that M. Vladov was commenting on was actually an essay I wrote last year while stuck in an airport with a long flight delay. It was on the Kronos Quartet performance of Henryk Górecki’s ‘and songs are sung…’ and how its meaning, for me, is closely tied to progressive disability and terminal decline to the end of life, as fundamental/inescapable parts of the human condition. The epigram at the top of that CMT post was actually someone else’s (Górecki’s?) rendering of the Khlebnikov poem into English, not my own.
And yet I very much like and appreciate M. Vladov’s clarification/correction. He/she says it’s not the survivors who sing on the occasion of the loved-one’s death. That comes later. It’s instead the one who is dying who, if lucky enough to have time and lucid moments so late in the game, “sings” an intimate, extemporized ‘epilogue’ of his/her life’s story, to anyone—anyone—who is nearby. Having worked for years in palliative medicine and hospice, I can say that that is true: the poignant, urgent need to create meaning by saying and singing to other members of our species—it is almost as strong as the need the heart has to beat and beat, or our hunger for air until, finally, the need collapses and we let go of that beating, breathing hunger and depart the planet. That is what Khlebnikov’s poem is about—or at least that’s what M. Vladov’s email makes me think, and what I believe he/she meant by ‘every line wrong’.
And the stars/suns don’t ‘fade out’ in the way that some English translations have it. This, in M. Vladov’s view, is just as outrageously wrong, same as the one in the liner of the Kronos CD. Instead, the stars/suns utterly cease! The light stops, they implode never to shine again—whatever. No dwindling, no dimming and fading, just sudden nuclear darkness.
Когда умирают кони - дышат, Когда умирают травы - сохнут, Когда умирают солнца - они гаснут, Когда умирают люди - поют песни... — Хлебников, 1912.
Further, it isn’t trivial grasses that wither and rot, prosaically, soullessly … in a manner that merits only passing regard from untouched humankind. Instead, the entire biosphere, vegetables and shrubberies and all, is ensouled and its members of all species have moral standing and have a capacity for sorrow, albeit implemented with very different nervous systems than we mammals have. And, oh, by the way, you will not get out unscathed by the death of the plants…
And horses, M. Vladov says, are relieved at the end—which I first-hand also know to be true, as I once owned horses and have seen them euthanized. The death rattle and last exhalation of a horse is louder than that of a human being. It’s a large animal with large lungs and big vital capacity and a tidal volume that is 10 to 15 mL/kg, or 6 liters compared to an adult human’s 750 mL. Horses are obligate nose-breathers. For those reasons, it is more likely that you will hear their dying breath and, if you hear it, more likely that you will hear it in enough detail that you will be able to grasp its several musical stages, millisecond by millisecond, until it is gone. You will not then doubt (if you ever did—) that the animal has a soul. It is not a stupid, empty moment. You can sense the animal’s relief as it lets go of the mortal body and flies away.
It is enough to, maybe, make you nostalgic for the time before you were born. No. Scratch that. For the time before you were conceived. [goes away from PC, listens to owls in moonlight, returns to desk, looks at a humorous photo of Luigi Nono]
I believe that more than ever before humankind has the opportunity and the ability to study; to open up new routes; to reach for peaks; to discover peaks that are beyond the heavens—different spaces, different worlds! Different abysses! Different fantasies!” — Luigi Nono.
Da capo… There is besides the Górecki, of course, another composition that referenced the same famous Khlebnikov poem and took it as an inspiration and point of departure: Luigi Nono’s ‘Quando stanno morendo’—the Italian for ‘When they are dying’. I’m not sure what M. Vladov will make of the Nono piece. Nono composed it for the Warsaw Music Festival of 1985, but the festival was cancelled. Some of Nono’s friends were in exile, some were in prison, and some were resisting the Russian ‘invasion that never happened’. Written in 1985 in Baden-Baden; ‘Quando stanno morendo No. 2’ is a chamber work that is scored for four female voices, plus flute, cello and live electronics. There are some analysts and historians who insist that this is a ‘political’ piece, but I think a valid personal, individualistic reading is also possible—in the same vein as the Gorecki. Anyone, I think, who has worked with the dying would think so…
L isten to this moment: a weak power thinking bringing to a [mortal] halt.” — Luigi Nono, Chorus, Prometeo.
Pure anxiety and beauty coexist in the vocal intervals that incarnate them. Nono was in those days experimenting with what one might call ‘timbral particle physics’, splitting the acoustic ‘atom’, combining different sonorities of instruments and instrumentalists’ breathing… anatomical sound-art of the human body, with instruments as prosthetic devices, crutches. For B-flat clarinet and C flute, dozens of tones are familiar to us; the contrabass flute, and contrabass clarinet ones, less so. The amplified flute here sounds like Khlebnikov’s expiring horse … my expiring cancer patient … evolving into gentle breath sounds and harmonics/gasps, followed by solo voices accompanied by low-pitched electroacoustics.
The finale has the singers again in restrained Khlebnikovian agony.
La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura’ takes us on a path that Nono suspects leads to a utopia—or at least something different than what we have now. Change we can believe in, not because we have any desire for or knowledge of the destination, but rather because we realize that our present location is no longer habitable. Our air is exhausted, our position here no longer tenable. It is patently obvious that it is untenable now; we have no choice but to depart this planet.
Luigi Nono
Arrived: 29-JAN-1924, Venice, Italy
Departed: 8-MAY-1990, age 66, Venice, Italy
Cause of death: undisclosed
Politics: Socialist
Nationality: Italy
Precis: Composer of serialist, electronic, and aleatoric music.
Education: B.Mus, Venice Conservatoire (1941); JD, University of Padua (1946); studied composition under Gian Francesco Malipiero, Bruno Maderna, Hermann Scherchen
Father: Mario Nono (civil engineer)
Mother: Maria Manetti
Significant other: at age 31 married Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg
L uigi Nono’s only score for string quartet, ‘Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima’ [Hushed Fragments for Diotima] already expresses at the very beginning of the 1980s, with its ample phrases made up of fragments mingled with long-held notes and drawn-our silences, that ‘tragedy of listening’ that haunts the composer’s last works—a world both crepuscular and ethereal, shot through with shadows and fleeting sensations, and a meditation on the ‘eternal, silent brightness’ of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.” — Arditti CD case blurb.
But beyond what must be said and beyond what we are so hungry to say at the end—beyond what occurs to us to sing just before we finally go—is that which is unsaid or unsayable, or unsung, unsingable. Luigi Nono’s composition for orchestra and electronics, ‘Prometeo’, is the epitome of that. John Wollaston gives a fine essay on the London Sinfonietta performance of ‘Prometeo’ earlier this year here. Prometheus was the Greek mythical figure who is symbolic of the belief in progress, and symbolic of unconditional love and hubris at the same time. [Hell, the idea of ‘unconditional love’ is hubristic all by itself, progress or no progress.] Prometheus also culminates Luigi Nono’s composerly thinking: extreme sound-art, predictable and unpredictable panning of sound fields within the performance space, and aleatoric compositional and performance processes—disembodied, spectral.
Prometeo’ as Luigi Nono’s answer to Schoenberg’s ‘Moses und Aron’? Nono’s ‘Quando stanno morendo’ is his answer to Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’? Well, no. To me, Nono seems more particular, more highly personal—more specific about the plight of the individual, rather than about the political plight of a class of people…
The estrangement of this body from its soul and the fragmentation of the sense of sight from the sense of sound that Nono achieves in ‘Prometeo’—especially if it is performed or recorded in a spacious performance hall—are remarkable. As Wollaston notes, “At this stage in Nono’s later musical theatre, sight no longer has a purpose. As he considered the visual realm a site for the most dangerous sorts of dictatorial manipulations, of both audience and source material, Nono aimed to rescue his musical theatre from visual elements. This anti-visual syndrome was developed in order that the fusion of the point of view might be a delicate one taking place within a craft of intricate networks upon magnified sonic elements.” Reflecting on the immediately prior CMT post on macular degeneration, I am led to wonder how low-visioned or blind people experience ‘Prometeo’. The uncertainties in ‘Prometeo’ are unnerving for us who still have good vision…
It’s an aleatoric-antiphonal chamber piece with four instrumental ensembles scattered to the four winds, with a choral ensemble on-stage, plus five solo singers deployed up on high platforms and scaffolding. Also distributed high in upper balcony/box locations on both sides of the auditorium are smaller groups of musicians and two narrators, along with tubas, a contrabass clarinet, and custom-made glass instruments. Electroacoustic parts are done via a speaker array that is deployed overhead and around the walls of the room. Wollaston says that this geometry “inscribe[s] several horizons, artificial or electronically produced, and actual. Each space has its chant; all together constitute the sky. And in these skies we might ‘rediscover the possible’.”
A mplified echoes play explicit formal roles in the present sound, the electronics enable precisely defined constructions in the course of the now-time of hearing with shapes and resources of a previously articulated event. This re-enunciated remnant is made mobile to such extent in a multiplicity of movement that the listener becomes lost in a kind of unitary perception. … A tension exists between a sense of circling the ultimate fragmentation, not the highest but the last, as sound director André Richard said at a pre-concert discussion, ‘the last before dying’, between this ultimate finality and an open possibility is compassable, the realm of infinitely variable potentialities where we ought ‘rediscover the possible’. Nono’s sound unravels a paradoxical seamlessness between the collapse into silence and extreme fragments of sonic event, pregnant and intensive. In this way, silence becomes a principle motivating force within the music.” — John Wollaston, review of London Sinfonietta performance of ‘Prometeo’.
W achtel’s nice book talks about the ‘transfiguration’ elements in Khlebnikov poems and others’ experiments with wordless ululations and ‘Zaum Gedichte’ (‘sound-poetry’; ‘beyond-sense-poetry’)—the organic, alinguistic simplicity of it; the association-free vocality of words sung, detached from human minds and intentions; emblems of Hölderlin’s tragedy as ‘the understanding in misfortune, the dreaming naive... to depict man’s understanding as wandering below the unthinkable.’
Semi-comprehending what they sing, we hear the experiences of the about-to-depart and imagine our own, sometime in the indefinite future. Long, sustained notes: a fragile, tenuous thread on which the spirit is suspended—in several different layers in musical space and in several layers of register/pitch. Fitting that I should happen to listen to this in the wee hours, on the basis of thoughts triggered by an email from an M. Vladov somewhere halfway around the planet…
Comments and emails are a delight when you send them to me here at CMT. I invariably learn something and often make new friends. If I make mistakes, please forgive me. Thank you! [goes back to listening to Arditti Quartet recording of Nono, Great Horned owls outside in the trees still howling aleatorically]
M usically, the work is luminous. Nono is a serialist, but one who knows how to make music sing and make music dramatic. The piece is full of powerful moments. Much was made of the inclusion of worker's songs including the Internationale when the piece was premiered. The use of such straightforward tonal material in an avant-garde piece was against the grain at the time. After 25 years, this doesn’t shock anymore. What does stay with you is how well integrated the tonal material is with the serial material. Nono uses similar procedures on the workers’ songs as he uses on his tone rows. The result gells nicely. It does not have the pastische quality that quotations in Berio’s Sinfonia have. Rather, it packs emotional punch. Nono was always considered to be the most politically committed of the Darmstadt set of the 50s and 60s. (Though Xenakis certainly was as well.) This may explain why his music retains such a powerful impact. Where Boulez was looking for an almost mathematical approach to composition, and Stockhausen was alternatively a musical explorer and a mystic, Nono was motivated by deep love for people. As a result his music retains a humanity that is more readily apparent than in other Darmstadters.” — Christopher Forbes, Brooklyn.
S hort motifs predominate... any feeling of meter is, basically, ‘local’. The majority of sections are only 8 bars long, with strong downbeat emphasis. Each section/variation offers new and different kinds of transparency, some more arpeggiated, some less so. The music may be Irish and Scottish in origin, but through this 2-hour recital I am drawn more than anything toward comparisons with Indian ragas—evolutions of a series of waves progressing over the ocean’s surface for hundreds of miles. 
