The Young Son, Part 2
Starting from scratch
In the first part of this essay series I described a spectrum spanning from Abstraction to Representation to The World, and on which any art-form might have what a ‘center of gravity.’ The center of gravity denotes the kind of relationship to representation that is easiest to create given the constraints of a particular art-form. The chart for music looked like this:
And here’s what I wrote, describing music’s abstract center of gravity, and comparing it to photography’s center of gravity, which lies completely on the other side of the spectrum, closer to ‘The World’:
Consider how trivially easy it is to take a snapshot of an apple and how incredibly difficult it is to write a melody about one… not only does that melody lack a causal or indexical relationship to an actual apple, it doesn’t resemble an apple at all! It’s abstract. So, just as one might describe some photography as grasping toward representation, so too might one describe certain musics as grasping toward the world.
By this account, musical genres like Affectivism (ie: artworks like John Cage’s 4'33", which attempt to consist entirely of an experience or affect) stretch the furthest away from the musical center of gravity, moving well past the representational middle-ground, and aiming to achieve the same indexical relationship to the world that haunts photography.
I stand by this account, but I want to add to it now. I’m especially aware that one might argue, as Cage might have, that it is the opposite side of the spectrum — The World — which is the appropriate place for music’s center of gravity. After all, what we often prize most about music is its affect — the way it makes us feel. Cage might have argued that music is not ‘naturally’ representational — it’s not a message or a picture of the world — but it isn’t abstract either. Music is raw, or non-conceptual. On this Cageian view, what music is actually ‘good at’ is producing a raw, sensuous, worldly experience.
I think this Cageian Affective view is deeply problematic. For one, the idea that human experience can actually be raw or non-conceptual is, at the very least, philosophically contentious. Regardless of that, Affectivism has another big problem with meaning. As Todd Cronan has argued beautifully, mere affect — or ‘beholder-response’ as it is sometimes known — cannot constitute the meaning of a work, as it cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ What you feel in the presence of a work cannot be equivalent to what that work means. If it were — that is, if the Affective view was right — then musical works could have no meaning, nor any normative stakes.
I’ve already claimed that the ideal of Absolute Music is both impossible and not worth wanting even if it were possible. So this leaves each of the two poles of this spectrum — pure-Abstraction and pure-Affectivism—with serious problems. Despite this, both ideals remain persistently subscribed to within musical discourse. I believe part of the explanation for the ubiquity of this abstract-affective dualism can be found in the very makeup of musical scores, like this one:
There are three salient features of scores. I want to mention two now and save the third for later. The first salient feature is that scores are decidedly abstract in the sense that they can be described as a set of instructions, or a recipe, or a map. The second salient feature is that scores themselves are so clearly not the endgame of musical composition. These instructions need to be followed by performers, and to be instantiated in the physical world through performance. These two features — the abstraction of scores and their seeming reliance on concrete performances — help explain the prevalance of abstractly and affectively oriented compositional thinking. Again, quoting myself from the last essay, this is an enormous problem for those who want to create meaningful art:
The ideal of Absolute music is impossible, but if it were possible it would be solipsistic, and therefore meaningless. Likewise, the ideal of Affectivist music is impossible, but if it were possible it would be entirely unintended, and therefore meaningless.
Though I couldn’t have articulated it when I started writing Clepsydra (the first movement of The Young Son), I was aware of how the musical score projects this flawed picture of art.
It is a picture of art which leaves out something crucial: the people — the performers, expressers, and interpreters. And so what I set out to do in Clepsydra, in retrospect, was to re-present this same flawed picture as starkly as I could. So starkly, in fact, that this missing piece — this absence of performers, expressers, or interpreters — would become glaring . And as a result, this glaring absence — this negative space — would become the stage. That is, it would delineate where theatre—and thus the amphibious entanglement of intention and action it affords me as a composer — will happen. I mean this both conceptually — that this negative space highlights the resonance between the necessary humanistic conditions for theatre and those for meaningful art — and literally — that it highlights the actual, physical space in the concert hall where the full spectrum of representational attitudes is set-up to be explicated.
I want to now talk in more detail about that physical space. Here is a birds-eye view of the staging for Clepsydra:
The horizontal line at the bottom of the image indicates the front edge of the stage. The performers sit in between two scrims, one at their backs, one in front of them. The scrim behind them sits on the ground, stands six feet by six feet, and is there to amplify the performers’ movements, which are projected in shadow by dim lights pointed at the scrim and through the performers’ bodies. The scrim in front of them is the same size as the other, but hung six feet in the air, and on it is projected — from the back of the stage — the score of Clepsydra, for the performers to read from. The score scrolls continuously, and this scrim is semi-transparent, so that the ‘back’ of the scrolling score is visible, if only in a distorted way, to the audience. From the perspective of an audience member sitting front and center, the staging will look like two large squares (the two scrims) stacked on top of each other, each consistently animated with dimly blurred motion:
Crucially, the motion which occurs on each screen — the shadowed motion of the performers, the blurred motion of the scrolling score — will appear to be indexically fused. This is due to the fact that this score — unlike, for instance, the traditional string quartet score above — indicates graphically exactly how the performers interact physically with their instruments in every moment of the performance. Traditional scores are interpreted by performers: a black note means one thing, a white note means another, etc. This score, however, is more-so dictated by performers. As it scrolls it graphically dictates to the performers how to move in real time. (One may object that these last two statements are false — that this score, just like the string quartet score, is interpreted, despite appearances. To notice this is one of several ways to notice the flawed picture of art presented in Clepsydra.)
There are two important ways, then, that the human element of this work is supressed, that the absence of performers, expressers, and interpreters is suggested. The first way is that the performers, especially their faces, are simply difficult to see. The easiest things to notice the performance of this work are the projected score, the disembodied shadowed movements, and the sounds. The performers themselves are easy to ignore, especially because score, movement and sound are presented as fused together. The second way is that the performers of Clepsydra are made machine-like in the way they must relate to the score, by transcribing it as opposed to interpreting it. The result is a work which re-presents that flawed picture of a de-humanized art.
I now want to bring up the third salient feature of musical scores that I alluded to earlier. In addition to often seducing composers into a problematic abstract-affective binary, scores also consistently project the presence of hierarchical structure. This is perhaps especially true of tonal music, but hierarchical structures are apparent even in musical scores that are not using tonality:
On these two pages of Ligeti’s Atmospheres, for example, one can easily perceive a hierarchical structure, a relationship between its parts (discreet, atomic pitches) and wholes (the fluctuating density of a large cloud of sound). Looking further one can see the relationship of the giant shifting cloud to the soft, stable sustaining notes on the bottom of the page. Further still, one can observe the relationship between the smaller, dissipating cloud at the top of the page and the larger, gradually accumulating cloud. Zooming in even further, one can notice how groups of instruments enter one by one in imitative succession. And these observations are, of course, only scratching the surface.
Clepsydra is preoccupied with this hierarchical conception of music. One reason for this preoccupation is that, as I’ve mentioned before, the goal I had in mind for Clepsydra was to build theatre, to start from scratch and build upwards, so to speak, toward theatre. But as you will see in the score-sample below, the fundamental parts of Clepsydra are not notes, pitches, rhythms, or motives. Instead, in an attempt to start ‘from scratch,’ Clepsydra posits physical movement itself as the most fundamental level of musical performance, as physical movement is a prerequisite for the performance of any pitches, rhythms, motives, etc. Again, these indications for physical movement are presented in Clepsydra’s score graphically. If you glance at the Cello part below, for instance, you can see a small diagram of the neck of the cello. The zig-zagging line which follows that diagram dictates exactly where the performer’s left hand should be on the neck at any given moment, as well as indicating things like grip (the x) and pressure (the thickness of the line).
A nother reason for my preoccupation with hierarchical structures in Clepsydra is the influence of the philosopher Daniel Dennett and his three stances: the physical stance, the design stance, and the intentional stance. We must take at least one of these stances whenever we want to explain or predict the behavior of something, and, depending on what we’re attempting to explain, one stance might be more useful than another.
So, for example, imagine we want to answer this question: “Why does ‘4’ appear when I press ‘2+2=’ on a calculator?” It would be foolish of us to take the physical stance and start counting the atoms in the calculator, or determining which metals and plastics it is made out of. This is because it is the design, or the architecture of the calculator which is pertinent here — we should be taking the design stance.
A different stance would be best for answering this question: “Why did she blush when she knew he knew her secret?” Taking the design stance here, perhaps by looking at the complexes of neurons in her brain or interrogating the web of capillaries in her cheeks, is also foolish. We do much better explaining her behavior by looking to her beliefs and desires — by taking the intentional stance.
The truly beautiful thing about Dennett’s stances is brought out in that second example: they show how abstract things like beliefs, intentions, and desires can be tangible and operative in the way we understand the world. To see the world through these stances is to see a world thick with architecture, a world where the transcendence or emergence of something as amorphous as truth is as real as the Empire State Building. It is an enchanted world, but without any need of the supernatural.
This is very much the vision of hierarchy with which Clepsydra — and The Young Son as a whole — is preoccupied. Not only was I trying to “build theatre” over the course of the entire larger work, I wanted this first foundational-level — this physical-level — movement to itself reflect an architectural hierarchy. As such, in Clepsydra, each performer’s staff is constructed to have both a ‘lower’, less constrained level and a ‘higher’, more constrained level, separated by a threshold. You can think of these levels, and the thresholds between them, as akin to Dennett’s stances. Crossing a threshold is analagous to moving from one stance to another.
For example, the trumpet staff includes instructions for how the performer uses their breath, and notations on this part of the staff indicate whether or not they are inhaling (in white) or exhaling (in black), and with how much intensity (the thickness of the shape). There are two thresholds in this part of the score, the top one occuring between ‘Breath’ and ‘Buzz,’ and the bottom one between ‘Breath’ and ‘Voice’. In the short example below, the trumpet player is asked to inhale, with increasing intensity, approaching the intensity which might result in a ‘buzz’ on the instrument, but just before that point, changing to a stable, low-intensity exhale (the bottom half of their staff indicates how to move the three keys on the trumpet):
In Clepsydra, crossing a threshold requires a necessary expenditure of energy. Musical material which lies ‘past’ a threshold has a more complex architecture. In the case of buzzing through the trumpet, it involves a more constrained relationship between the performer and their instrument involving embouchure, lip tension, air control, etc. The pitches which occur at this ‘higher’ level are thus reliant on the design of the instrument in a way in which the mere breath is not. Likewise, this ‘higher’ level of buzzing is also dependent upon, or built out of, the ‘lower’ level of breath. The implication from this is that even a simple, indefinite buzzed pitch played on a trumpet has an incredibly rich architecture beneath it. This is a view of music akin to Dennett’s view of nature, wherein even a single pitch achieves a transcendence of its constituent parts.
For both wind instruments in this work, the thresholds are somewhat nebulous: lying between air and instrumental tone or air and sung material. For the cello the threshold is considerably more concrete: between the bridge of the instrument, separating the long, muted strings from the high-pitched behind-the-bridge strings. and for the percussionist, the threshold is the most concretely delineated, between the bass-drum head which is laid flat like a table and the glockenspiel which rests on top of it.
Notice how each threshold separates a ‘lower-level,’ less organized, less clear place (bass drum head, air-sound, muted strings) from a ‘higher level,’ more organized, more clear place (glockenspiel keys, pitched tone or singing, taught and pitched behind-the-bridge strings). And notice further how this hierarchical structure is again reiterated on an orchestrational scale through the differing types of thresholds on each of the four instruments, which create a spectrum from amorphous and indeterminate — between breath and voice — to concrete and stacked — between a bass drum and a glockenspiel. (The placement of the instruments on the page displays this spectrum, from the most abstract thresholds at the bottom to the most concrete at the top.)
Such is the logic of Clepsydra: First, a flawed, de-humanized picture of art. Then, the transformation of that negative space into a stage on which a meaning-saturated artwork might arise; a re-presentation of what theatricality affords the musical art form. And finally, a hierarchical structure based in physicality, reaching past design, and aspiring toward intention and thus meaning.
Let me pivot now from speaking about the logic of the work to describe the activity of the work — what happens in it. There are a few more details I would like to point out.
To begin with, this is what the score for Clepsydra looks like when the performers simultaneously cross their ‘thresholds’:
I call these semi-symettrical structures ‘peaks,’ and the middle section of them, when every performer is past their threshold, ‘windows.’ This is what this particular peak might sound like:
Of course, as it is not precise sounds which are notated in this work, but physical movements, every performance will sound somewhat different. The clear pitches you hear in the ‘window’ of this clip are not precisely notated, they’re just the ones which occured when the performers interacted physically with their instruments in the way dictated by the score. The instability of those ‘higher levels’ or ‘windows’ — which one can hear in the wavering and stifled voices of the performers — is an important element of Clepsydra, as it highlights that these ‘windows’ require considerable effort to keep open, like fighting against gravity to lift a heavy weight.
Toward the end of the work I break from these regularities and, after ascending up a peak, I allow its higher-level window to simply remain ‘open’ for several minutes, as if defying gravity. Having suspended a fall back into the lower, ‘physical’ levels, I take advantage of the representational or theatrical architecture at my disposal:
Here, as the flautist exhales a light sigh — “huhhh” — condensation collects in the form of shimmering wire brushes on the glockenspiel. The cellist traces patterns in it with her finger, heavy pressure creating a smudging, stuttering sound along the neck of her instrument.
Later on, a small peak within this scene gives rise to some discreet musical pitches, quoted from the Renaissance-era choral motet Sicut Cervus by Giovanni Palestrina. But they’re distorted and muffled, as if heard through the window.
But there was no statement
At the beginning. There was only a breathless waste,
A dumb cry shaping everything in projected
After-effects orphaned by playing the part intended for them,
Though one must not forget that the nature of this
Emptiness, these previsions,
Was that it could only happen here, on this page held
Too close to be legible, sprouting erasures, except that they
Ended everything in the transparent sphere of what was
Intended only a moment ago, spiraling further our, its
Gesture finally dissolving in the weather.
It was the long way back out of sadness
Of that first meeting: a half-triumph, an imaginary feeling
Which still protected its events and pauses, the way
A telescope protects its view of distant mountains
And all they include, the coming and going,
Moving correctly up to other levels, preparing to spend the night
There where the tiny figures halt as darkness comes on,
Beside some loud torrent in an empty yet personal landscape.
