Sacred Tears

1.

QUICQUID DEUS CREAVIT PURUM EST, it reads above the entrance to Tomba Emmanuelle, EVERYTHING CREATED BY GOD IS PURE, in what seems to be the perfect antithesis to the dark inferno of sex and death one enters seconds later. But only seems. For what, if not purity, is the very essence of VITA, with its never-ending cycle of birth, growth and death, purity of vision, and purity of form, all of mankind’s vitality and anxieties and unspeakable fears frozen in almost ornamental patterns of naked figures? The scenes are those of both productive and counterproductive human activity, men and women engaged in Kama-Sutra-like lovemaking side by side with skulls and bones and decomposing corpses, with the ultimate synthesis of life and death conjured up in what is perhaps the most extreme image of them all, that of two skeletons copulating at the base of a monolith of levitating infants.

It wouldn’t be far-fetched to call it a marriage between Heaven and Hell, the heavy lumps of struggling bodies on each wall transforming into lighter elusive shapes as they hit the ceiling, evaporating into some unknown realm. Yes, Vigeland’s VITA is Inferno and Paradiso combined, depicting raw nature with a sort of sublime dignity, the latter underlined by the fact that one has to lower one’s head when entering, bowing for what is slowly to become extinguishable in the semi-darkness of the crypt, placed in a small niche just above the entrance door, still, even after a while, only barely perceptible against the dark brown wall: a hollow stone—an urn—holding the artist’s ashes. It is as concrete—and as abstract—as it gets. And what a great metamorphosis as well: the artist’s studio turned into the artist’s tomb, the spirit of Emanuel Vigeland (1875-1948) forever contained within the walls of the magnificent brick building at Slemdal, with its legendary acoustics, creating droning dreamlike soundscapes out of the lightest footsteps, the slightest cough, a sigh or even a single breath (the reverb lasting up to twenty seconds, I’ve been told). Why the hell isn’t every artist buried where he or she worked?

2.

Inspired, possibly, by the shape of the room, I always think of Jonah and the whale whenever I visit Tomba Emmanuelle, the ceiling curving like gigantic ribs above me. And given the two representations of the artist himself, both in the right corner of the entrance wall, one—alive, brush and palette in hand, in the act of painting (VITA)—above the other—dead, with the palette and brushes scattered on the ground, as if the work itself has first exhausted him, then killed him—I can’t help thinking that there is a third representation as well, which is the crypt itself, and that while Dante and Virgil had to climb over Satan’s hairy body to get to Purgatorio, the dead Vigeland has left his mouth open, in rigor mortis, for us to climb in, down the throat and into the holy chambers of his chest and stomach, the naked bodies crawling all around us playing the role of the mental intestines, so to speak, of his—literally—inner world.

To read the entirety of "Sacred Tears" as well as three other pieces by Stig Sæterbakken, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 5 . . .

A Discussion and a Monologue

Peter Sellars: Was Kaija’s music always, even from the beginning, conceived imagistically?

Esa-Pekka Salonen: I think always. I think that was the identity of hers as a composer from the very beginning.

PS: I mean, while the boys were dealing with a lot of theoretical questions and scientific relations…I have a sense that Kaija is always functioning on her inner image?

EPS: Yes. In Kaija’s work, the visual and the aural are linked.

PS: Synaesthetically linked?

EPS: Yes, but not in terms of conventional synaesthesia, where one color would correspond to a harmony or a pitch. It is more like if you were to translate a musical experience into another medium, in Kaija’s case it would be a visual image, although for many others it would be verbal.

PS: Right.

EPS: So we guys were dealing with concepts, and by definition “concept” is something that you define in words. 

PS: Right.

EPS: Even in the early days, Kaija was not interested in concepts; and now that you mention it, that was a profound difference. Then there comes a moment in life when you stop trying to translate between language and music and realise that music is in some ways like a butterfly: if you touch its wing, you will destroy something and then it cannot fly any more. Music has to be allowed to be its own thing rather than trying to organise it through another medium. But in Kaija’s work these two kinds of expression breathe the same air, so to speak.

PS: I just do not know this first piece that you’re describing. Is it an immersive, physical experience?

EPS: Well, it’s a process. Kaija’s early pieces were almost always manifestations of one process, so there was one formal idea, and that was the piece, to put it simple.

In Verblendungen, the dramatic arc of the piece is formed by a sort of textural metamorphosis. That sounds very theoretical, but it was very expressive. She had made a tape part at IRCAM, and this was at a time when the computer stuff that came out of IRCAM was not very expressive but kind of cold and theoretical, but hers was different. Her metaphor was a painter’s brush, and the piece is one stroke of a brush, basically: the paint is thickest at the beginning of the stroke, and then it thins out and disperses into strands, and every strand is a different shape, and then they all run into nothingness at the end. That was the form, basically. The tape was loosely synchronised with the orchestra, so it was not a click-track job for me.

I remember a very funny thing about that concert. I was a guinea pig for the applied arts school at that time, and one of the classes had an assignment to create a conductor’s outfit. So I was wearing this conductor’s outfit in this concert, and it had a sort of tunic-style upper part that somehow just would not stay on. It was slipping down over my shoulder all the time, so I was conducting this piece, one of my first real concerts, and the world premiere of a really talented friend of mine, and I was fighting with my damn jacket at the same time. But it was fine.

PS: At that time, were you guys still involved in intense conversations and discussions about what everyone was making? Or by that time had she gone away to Paris and was no longer a part of ongoing conversation here?

EPS: Well, what happened was of course that everybody in the core group of the society went somewhere. Kaija went first to Freiburg. She was there for a year or something like that.

PS: Oh, with Ferneyhough?

EPS: Yes, and Klaus Huber, those two. And actually Magnus Lindberg and I, we made it to her diploma concert in Freiburg.

PS: No. No!

EPS: Yes. We took the train through half of Europe and made it to the diploma concert. At that point we had not slept for two days. Kaija was very touched by us being there, and so were her parents. It was kind of funny, because there we were, Magnus and I, we had made it, such a relief; and we were sitting in the first row, and the concert began, and we promptly fell asleep! Because we were so relieved. And Kaija was like: you guys are just hopeless.

PS: It is something special to have friends.

EPS: But we made it there! And that was the big deal.

PS: That’s fantastic.

To read the entire conversation between Peter Sellars and Esa-Pekka Salonen (concluded by a brilliant monologue on Saariaho's work by Sellars), purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 5 . . .

My Library, from Words to Music

At the heart of my library is a shelf filled, in no particular order, with my favorite books. Surrounding this shelf, in perfect order, are my books on music and all the other books. I come back to the shelf with my favorite books every time I want to take a retrospective look at my life. I choose books that are dear to me, I flip through them and reread them while paying attention to the feelings they arouse in me: what has changed?

In my childhood, poetry captivated me above all, and when I seriously began to set down on paper the music that came to me, this music often took form thanks to a poem. I felt particularly close to the poet Edith Södergran. Her collection Runoja (Poems), collected by Lauri Viljanen from the poems he translated from Swedish to Finnish, was one of my nightstand books until adolescence. When I began to read Södergran’s poems in Swedish, the colors and the rhythm of the original text inspired me in a new way and, around some of them, musical ideas were created in my mind. As a result, in 1977, I created a small collection of songs titled Bruden. One of the songs’ first verses described the collection rather well: “I am nothing but infinite will, infinite will, but to what end, to what end?” These words came from the poem “My Life, My Death, and My Fate.” This was my first “serious” composition. Aside from these songs, which I composed ten years ago, when I was still a student, I didn’t compose any other music based on Södergran’s texts. These poems, for me, were part of my childhood, which I couldn’t and didn’t want to touch again. They encouraged me while I was trying to find a path and a goal for my ideas. When I read them again today, these poems which once transported me now bring back these feelings from my childhood. I’m surprised to realize that, after that point, there wasn’t any possibility of transforming poems into music, and that I had already set that aside in the interest of developing an abstract musical language.

Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a novel where creative intelligence and complex metaphors combined, reflects particularly well what I was looking for in my music. The richness of her language escapes simplistic interpretation and I asked myself how to achieve a similarly prismatic language in music. This question was amplified by my reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; I was more and more interested by the exactitude of language. I still remember those sunlit April days when, recovering from a throat infection, I savored Swann’s love while telling myself: I don’t want to come to the end. Behind me, I heard Pierre Boulez’s Structures II, which, aside from those few days, I have never appreciated. The cold intelligence of this music mixed with Proust’s text, and the text illuminated Boulez’s French world in a new way, by giving him the heat that had otherwise been missing.

This idea of a synthesis between language and sound became a goal. This goal was to develop an abstract reflection and, by means of this reflection, gain control over my sensibility, and gain equilibrium between the mind and the heart.

To read the entire collection of Kaija Saariaho's essays, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 5 . . .

A Mind of Surplus

Mary Ruefle’s website claims that she doesn’t have an email address. For a writer with what one might assume to be an aversion to the feverish of the digital, her poems function as both an exorcism and curation of excessive information and imagination. She is a remarkably controlled poet, but is frenetic within this control, leaping from one pocket of image and allusion to another. Her poems, in effect, comment on excesses of information, and disallow any hope for moralistic or pedagogic resolution. What exists in Ruefle’s lines, then, is the aesthetic of a fable, the familiar tropes and vehicles that exist within the room of the “usual” parable: bringing the concept of reaching toward morality to a poem saturated with image and ideas.

Ruefle’s poems, often one-block stanzas, exist as solid pieces of an entire structure working toward the ideal of fable, but they never quite impart the experience or any lesson which is a defining trait of the classical morality tale—nor does Ruefle intend them to. If we were to call her poems fables, we would do so in positing that they are fables not broken by modernity but wary of singular direction or consequence because of it: they hinge on the strain of a surplus of image, ultimately receding into either a large and unknown or a small and obscure entity as they finish. Ruefle shuns the desire for an epiphanic conclusion, resisting our preconceptions informed by the fable archetype in order to avoid any glimmer of moralizing. We find this in the final lines of “The Beautiful is Negative,” for instance (“Or crickets scraping away / when words fail you”) and in “Depicted on a Screen” (“I know this world up and leaves / on a lacquered palanquin, / taking with it a splendour / I won’t see again.”), where Ruefle offers a portrait of something vital disappeared, changed beyond recognition.

This resistance to moralizing constitutes her poems’ successes, as we find in “Lullaby”:

My inability to express myself

is astounding. It is not curious or

even faintly interesting, but like

some fathomless sum, a number,

a number the sum of equally fathomless

numbers, each one the sole representative

of an ever-ripening infinity

that will never reach the weight

required by the sun to fall.

Reaching toward knowledge or epiphany—and falling short—is perhaps Ruefle’s comment on the inadequacy of morality forms in a modern context. In Aesop’s fables, promises and warnings are inevitable consequences of certain behaviors. With images stimulating seemingly endless thoughts and tangents for possible thought, Ruefle’s poetry faces us with an almost existential idea of the moral, an inevitability of behavior without prescribed consequence. What will happen will happen—often absurdly, whether we behave ourselves or not. Behavior itself—of animals, of humans, of relationships, of words—unravels in her poems toward something absurd or obscured, bleak and metaphysical. These poems are fables as replications of life—broad and three-dimensional, curated. They misbehave and carry forth with abandon.

To read Rachael Allen's entire essay, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

A Conversation with Mary Ruefle

You have said before that within each poem lies another, smaller poem. What do you mean by that? And what is the relationship between the two poems?

Well, plenty of people would say that within each poem lies a larger, longer, more ambitious poem! But that’s not the way I look at things. Years of making erasures has led me to another view. One thing erasure work has taught me is that no matter how much you hone something down, you can’t lose the essence of what was there in the first place. A metaphor I might use to talk about this is the metaphor of a clay; within each day are hours, smaller units of time, and every day has some special hour that seems to be a distillation of the day. One hour which can be viewed as representative of the day. The relationship between these two is that of the part to the whole, and in all things we have no way of ever really knowing the Whole, but we can know a part of it, and that part has to suffice. I am definitely now talking about the universe and individual lives within it, and also of the sense that every poem is just a part of something, call it a life, the poem is just one little stone, no one can see the configuration all the stones make together, but on any given day, one stone will have to suffice. For the Whole. Oh, I am talking about fractals! I promised myself I wouldn’t do that! But when you think of it, in terms of fractals, those who think that within each poem lies a larger, longer, more ambitious poem, are right—the part and the Whole in the end are the same. But I am one who is inclined to chip away. You know what I love? I love haiku. It is impossible to find within them another, smaller poem. But in every novel there is a short story, and in every story a poem, and in every poem a haiku. And in every haiku there is a moment that stands for all of time.

But to answer your question directly, in a workshop when I say there is in a poem another, smaller poem, I am simply finding a pleasant, encouraging way to ask you to please make some more cuts!

When I first saw you give a reading, you read “that letter” from James Wright’s Selected Letters. (I am referring to the letter written to Susan Gardner on December 23, 1964.) Every other time I have seen you read, you insist on reading something someone else wrote. Why do you do that?

I like to read the writings of other people for several reasons. One is because they are so much better than my own! Another is because we simply do not have enough poetry readings of the great poems written by the great masters of the past, those who have died. Because of this, I once decided to give a “lecture” which consisted of nothing but me reading the poems of the dead for three-quarters of an hour. I read everything from Keats to Berryman to Desnos to Issa to Mew and back again. And it was a complete failure. My trusted friends and colleagues all agreed, we talked about it later—it was a failure. And we wondered why. Everyone had a different theory. To this day I don’t know why. Someone said it was because there was no “arc” but I’ve never been much invested in arcs. I don’t think that’s why. I think it’s because when we attend something called a lecture, we are looking for something, and of course poetry is just plain looking. And all these great poets, the only ones who can really teach us anything, I don’t think at that moment the students felt they were learning anything, and though that was my whole point—looking, not looking for—that was the lesson, the whole thing imploded in some terrible sad way, which broke my heart. It’s really hard to give a lesson about unlearning, because it’s such a contradiction in terms. It may well be impossible. On a brighter note, once I delivered, word by word, John Cage’s famous “Lecture on Nothing” and it was a great success. Cage was able to do it in his own way, using his own words, and that is really something. Anyway, when I read all those great poems from the past, I only read about a quarter of the ones I had chosen—there wasn’t enough time for them all—and I hope one day to read the rest, to just stand up and try again. And fail again. And keep failing. And keep having my heart broken. And this has everything to do with audience—finding the audience who is receptive to poetry rather than endless commentary on it. And yet I feel tenderness towards young people who are searching, who are seeking, who are looking for rather than looking, because I once was young myself, and doing just that, and I see now it is the beginning of the path that leads to looking.

On another note, lately I have taken to reading at readings a letter written by my great aunt in 1978, when she was 92 and senile. She wasn’t a literary person in the least, she was just an ordinary woman, yet remarkable in her day—she was born in the nineteenth century—insofar as she never married and held a job her whole life and thereby earned enough money to send two of her nephews (one of them my father) to college when they otherwise could not have afforded it. To contribute to the education of two children who are not your own—that strikes me as something.

It’s a quotidian, rambling letter about the weather and loneliness and stuff like that, but in it she repeatedly mentions writing—by which she means letter-writing, the only form of writing that ever occurred to her—as something essential to her life. I read this letter because I never sufficiently appreciated her while she was alive—I was too young and preoccupied—and because she clearly “got” something essential about writing, writing in any form, and because letter-writing is actually secretly perhaps my favorite form of writing, and it is near extinction. And because I want to give her an audience. This is a quote from her letter, “Seems to me I did just write to you folks but I will mail this anyway. I get a thrill just sitting writing a letter, so will just keep it up.” Which is exactly why, once having written a poem, we sit and write another. Which is why audience is of no import.

To read this entire extensive interview with Mary Ruefle, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

Dios los cría. . .

Dios los cría y ellos se juntan: “God makes them and they find each other.” This is what comes to my mind whenever I think of Barry Guy and Maya Homburger. Now, I know that my Spanish friends will protest, arguing that this old adage is used to describe those characters who live on the other side of the fence, who, shall we say, profit through illicit activity or live on the margins of “civilized” society. But there is something about Homburger and Guy that places them on the other side of the fence—as cross-genre musicians they transgress carefully protected precincts of musical activity: Guy, the improviser, is equally comfortable in Baroque performance; Homburger, the Baroque music specialist, is an exceptional improviser. And there is certainly something that feels illicit in their live performances; when they play, flick knives are drawn. As the devil in Mann’s Doctor Faustus reminds us, the artist is the brother of the felon and the madman. But my real point here is that as individuals these musicians are remarkable; when they play together something even more extraordinary and unique happens. Dios los cría…

I have heard Guy perform in many different capacities and groupings, and am slowly beginning to understand what might be described as his “signature” as a musician. Extraordinarily, each time I hear him, it’s like the first, because his improvisations always take you somewhere new. I distinctly remember first hearing Guy about fifteen years ago in St. Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny town. He came out with his bass and a tray of bows, sticks, mallets, and something that looked remarkably like a toilet brush. The moment the bow touched the strings, something magical occurred. It’s very difficult to describe the effect his playing had on me. This was the first time I heard sounds being created alchemically, as it were, in front of my eyes and ears; music that slashed at you, took your breath away, modulated suddenly from vicious stabs to tender caresses. There was an incredibly exhilarating physicality, in a true sense a “bodying forth” to this music-making. Gestures of color, line and harmony were spontaneously interwoven and in constant flux, but never incoherent. Everything seemed to be in the right place, and yet this was being formed, performed, enacted straight out of Guy’s physical and musical consciousness; the moment of composition, execution, and hearing was instantaneous. 

Despite the difference in genre, Homburger’s interpretations of Baroque music have quite the same effect. Yes, the music is largely notated, the melodic and harmonic trajectories set, but Homburger’s total understanding of performance style and her astounding technical prowess give her a freedom of expression that matches the seeming impulsiveness of Guy’s improvisations. Debates about performance practice are still divisive. It’s hard to deny the interpretative validity of some renowned performers who play Bach and Handel in pretty much the same way they play Schumann. Richter does bring a certain dark majesty to Bach (his Fugue no. 4 in C-sharp minor, from the Preludes and Fugues, for example). But in Homburger’s hands, we are brought very close to the true spirit of Baroque music. She utterly understands the rhetoric at the core of this music. So when you hear her perform one of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, for example, you are not only fully aware of her ability to musically characterize specific ideas and symbols relating to the subject matter of the music, you are deeply implicated in, and affected by, her rhetorical delivery. This is what makes her performances of Baroque music so special: like Guy’s improvisations, they are alchemical experiments. The listener is brought into an intimate, coterminous relationship with the music—an experience that can be both exhilarating and vulnerable. 

To read Benjamin Dwyer's entire tribute, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

A Letter to Tânia Kaufmann

Berne, 6th January 1948

My little flower,

I received your letter from that strange Bucksy, dated December 30th. How happy I was, my little sister, with certain sentences you wrote. But please don’t say: I discovered there is still a large part of me that is alive. No, my darling! You are entirely alive. It’s just that you’ve lived an irrational life, a life that doesn’t resemble you. Tania, don’t think we are so strong that we can lead any type of life and stay the same. Even eliminating one’s own faults can be dangerous—you never know which is the fault that sustains our entire edifice. I don’t even know how to explain it to you, dear sister, my soul. But what I wanted to say is that we are very precious, and that it is only up to a certain point that we can give up on ourselves and give ourselves to others and to circumstance. After a person loses respect for herself and the respect for her own needs—after that you end up rather like a rag. I would like so, so much to be by your side and talk, and tell you of my own and others’ experiences. You would see there are certain times when the first duty to undertake is to yourself. I myself didn’t want to tell you how I am now, because it seemed useless. I only intended to tell you about my new disposition, or lack of disposition, one month before we went to Brazil, so you would be warned. But I live in so much hope that on the ship or airplane that takes us back I will transform instantly into the old me, that perhaps there wouldn’t even have been a need to tell you. Darling, nearly four years have very much changed me. From the moment I accepted my lot, I lost all vivacity and all interest in things. You’ve seen how a castrated bull is transformed into a bullock? that’s what’s happened to me…, though the harsh comparison weighs heavily… In order to adapt to what was un-adaptable, to overcome my revulsions and my dreams, I had to shed my spikes—I cut the strength within me that could harm others and myself. And with that I cut my own strength too. I hope you never see me passive like this, because it’s almost repugnant. I hope that on the ship that takes us back, just the idea of seeing you and recovering a little of my life—which wasn’t wonderful but was a life—makes me transform entirely. The other day Mariazinha, Milton’s wife, screwed up her courage, those were her words, and asked me: you used to be very different, didn’t you? She said that she had thought me ardent and vibrant, and that when she saw me now she said: this excessive calm is either an act or she has changed practically beyond recognition. Another person told me that I move with the lassitude of a fifty-year-old woman. You will see nor feel any of this, God willing. There shouldn’t even be a need to tell you, then… But I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to show you what can happen to a person who made a pact with everyone, and who forgot that the vital knot of a person needs to be respected. My little sister, listen to my advice, listen to my request: respect yourself more than others, respect your needs, respect even what is bad in you—respect especially what you imagine to be bad in you—for the love of God, don’t try to make yourself into somebody perfect—don’t copy an ideal person, copy yourself—that is the one way to live. I am so scared that what happened to me will happen to you, because we are similar. I swear to God that if there were a heaven, a person who sacrifices themselves out of cowardice—will be punished and go to any old hell. That’s if a tepid life isn’t punished by that same tepidness. Take for yourself what belongs to you, and what belongs to you is all that your life demands. It seems like an amoral moral. But what is truly amoral is having given up on yourself. I hope to God you believe me. I would even like for you to come and watch my life without my knowing—because just knowing about your presence would transform me and give me life and happiness. It would be a lesson for you. To see what can happen when you make a pact with complacency in your soul. Have the courage to transform yourself, my darling, to do what you desire—be that going out at the weekends, be that what it may. Write to me without worrying that you need to speak of neutral things—because how can we be good to one another without this smallest degree of sincerity?

May the new year bring you every happiness, my darling. Here is an embrace filled with saudade, with enormous saudade, from your sister,

Clarice

Translated from the Portuguese by Ana Fletcher

To read the entire portfolio of Lispector letters, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

The Last Interview

In several interviews you’ve given, the question almost inevitably arises of: How did you start? When? You started when you were seven years old…

I know. Before I was seven I was already making up stories. For example I thought of a story that never ended… It’s hard to explain what that story was like. But when I learned to read and write, I also began to write stories. Little stories.

When the young, practically adolescent Clarice Lispector discovers that it’s literature, that area of human creation, that attracts her the most, does the young Clarice have any goal in mind, or does she just want to write?  

Just to write. 

Can you give us an idea of what the teenage Clarice Lispector’s production was like? 

Chaotic. Intense. Entirely outside the reality of life.

Can you remember any titles from that period? 

Well, I wrote lots of things before publishing my first book. I’d already written for magazines, stories, newspapers. I went with enormous shyness—but the shyness of someone daring—I’m shy and daring at the same time. I’d go to the magazine and say: “I wrote a story, do you want to publish it?” And then I remember once it was Raymundo Magalhães Jr., who looked at me, read a bit of it, and said: “Who did you copy this from?” And I said: “No one, it’s mine.” And he said: “Did you translate it?” And I said: “No.” And he said: “Then I’ll publish it.” That’s how it went at the beginning. 

Which publications were those?

I don’t remember. Newspapers, magazines. 

Clarice, when did you actually decide to become a professional writer?

I never did. I never did. I’m not a professional. 

Why not?

I only write when I want to. I’m an amateur and insist on staying that way. A professional has a personal commitment to writing. Or a commitment to someone else to write. As for me… I insist on not being a professional. To keep my freedom. 

Do you write frequently, or do you have periods in which you produce intensively?

I have periods in which I produce intensively and periods—hiatuses—in which life becomes intolerable.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser

To read the entirety of Clarice Lispector's last interview, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

An Interview with Barry Guy

How do you compose? At a piano? 

Yes and no. My compositions start their lives with reflections upon paintings, architecture and of course musical possibilities. So, before I really use the keyboard I normally accumulate various sketches that indicate (possibly) movement, energy, pitch areas and outline structures. The keyboard is used later in the process to confirm pitch relationships, note rows and other procedures that help during the composing process. If I ever wrote a piece based only upon my keyboard expertise, the composition would be destined for the trash can. 

What about when you compose for the baroque violin are there particular characteristics that you consider when you compose for that instrument? 

The characteristics I hear, relate to the intense and extremely varied colours emanating from an instrument in original baroque condition with a construction that allows the violin to resonate—with an overall lower tension caused by a straight neck and therefore lower bridge and also open gut strings. What comes over to my ears is a beautifully free sound with overtones resonating without “power playing” the violin. Composing music for this instrument has always presented me with a dilemma. The fact is that there is so much stunning extant music written for the baroque violin which begs the question—who needs more? Anyway, living with baroque violinist Maya Homburger has enabled me to gain confidence in approaching the subject of new music for this glorious instrument. 

How would those compositions differ if they were composed for a modern violin?

As it happens, the compositions I have written for the baroque violin can also be played on modern set-ups. There is a limit to how high one can write for instance, since the fingerboard of the original instrument is shorter than its modern counterpart. Also, I avoid percussive and pizzicato articulations because they would quickly detune the open gut strings. For the modern instrument I would use all of the above. 

You’ve used Beckett’s writing for pieces which, unlike your Mallarmé composition, don’t include any of his words. I’m thinking here of Fizzles, which you play alone on double bass? 

I’m a constant reader of Samuel Beckett and I find new discoveries every time I encounter his texts. Concerning Fizzles: Beckett wrote eight texts between 1960 and 1976, seven of which were written in French (under the title Foirades) and one—”Still”—in English. Each “Fizzle” is a short compressed outburst—literary chamber music of great power and beauty. It occurred to me that these “outbursts” could form the basis for little improvisations, each dedicated to particular bass colours and articulations. I have variously performed them in sets of 3, 5, or 7 according to the programme at hand. I find them to be a motivator for precise thinking and musical rhetoric.

To read the entire interview with Barry Guy, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

An Interview with Maya Homburger

When you first began to learn the violin were you playing the romantic repertoire? 

Like all young children (I started at the age of seven), I played baroque sonatas, etc., first, and then the classic and romantic repertoire. 

At what stage did you begin to be attracted to the idea of historically informed performance? 

This happened in 1979 on the occasion of a master class with Professor Eduard Melkus, who came to Bern to introduce us to the baroque violin. It was love at first sight with this instrument and resulted in me studying with him in Vienna at the same time as finishing my studies in Berne. 

If you were asked to play a Brahms violin sonata for some prestigious festival what would you say? 

I could not do this anymore since I have not touched a modern violin or modern bow since 1986 when I moved to England. I could not even cope with the weight of the modern bow anymore. 

How have attitudes to playing baroque music changed since you began to concentrate on playing music from that time? 

A lot of so-called modern players are much better informed about the historical way of performing baroque music. So, in general, I think there is more awareness for the special stylistic requirements of baroque music. Having said that…of course you can still hear the most famous violinists playing a Bach solo sonata or concerto as if it were a romantic piece to be played in a huge concert hall. And what you also get (sadly!) is a totally distorted vision of speed when it comes to for example Bach violin concertos or even fast movements within the solo sonatas and partitas: some modern players tend to favor extremely fast speeds which in my opinion reduce Bach’s music to light weight entertainment. 

What technical difficulties arise when playing one of Barry Guy’s compositions for baroque violin? 

Barry composes in a way which is very idiomatic for my baroque violin and its potential. So, there are not that many specific difficulties for the baroque violin. BUT, the pieces are in themselves very hard and virtuosic. So, it takes me a long time, in the case of Lysandra and Aglais for example even several years to feel really on top of it. Having said that, he has also devised a few techniques which go totally against all the engrained instincts, which are inbuilt for many years—one example being a passage in Inachis where one plays very fast virtuosic scales , but is not allowed to fully depress the string onto the fingerboard. So, the fingers only lightly touch the string but in the correct position. This took me many months to learn, but has had a wonderfully freeing effect on the overall left hand technique. 

How easy, or difficult, do you find it to improvise when you are required to do so? 

I am still not a REAL improviser. So, I only feel comfortable when I am led into an improvised passage via fully notated sections. 

Barry is a master at this. He can free me up by giving me for example a note row, or given pitches to be played in any order within a box of possibilities. In the case of “Amphi” for the BGNO and baroque violin he has also written passages where I play fully notated material, but at the same time can react to the glorious improvisations of Evan Parker, Agusti Fernandez, Johannes Bauer, etc. This gives me the chance to change the written material, extend and vary it, and feel as if I was improvising. A fantastic feeling.

To read the entire interview with Maya Homburger, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

Remarks on Clarice Lispector

I discovered the work of Clarice Lispector rather late in life. When a reader is young, a constant stream of discovery flows through one‘s reading life, but after one has “read everything” (an utter impossibility, but nonetheless a persistent literary feeling) the authors that constitute a major discovery flood one with a special kind of hopefulness I cannot explain; who believes they will find a new best friend after fifty? But it happens. 

When I first read the stories in Soulstorm, they shocked me. And in the “explanation” that precedes the stories, Clarice Lispector says “I was shocked by reality.” This by a woman already famous for writing fantastical stories such as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” the tale of a lady 17 3/4 inches high, which I had read years earlier in an anthology and marked as a wonder, without paying much attention to who the author was. I was shocked by reality. This statement is an artistic one. It brings the world to a standstill, which is very often what art does; it does this despite the fact it is impossible.

When I think of Clarice Lispector, I think of her years as a diplomat’s wife in Washington, D.C., and the endless round of cocktail and dinner parties that are a necessary part of that life, and how her existence as a writer must have been relegated to a place so inner it was in danger of disappearing; at the very least, no one sitting next to her could see it. But this place—the inner life—is the one thing that can never vanish, or if it were ever to vanish, literature itself would vanish with it.

To read Mary Ruefle's entire essay on Clarice Lispector, purchase your copy of Music & Literature no. 4 . . .

An Interview with Gerald Murnane

Will Heyward: I like the epigraph to Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs where you say: “I should never have tried to write fiction or nonfiction or even anything in-between. I should have left it to discerning editors to publish all my pieces of writing as essays.” And you say something similar in Barley Patch about rejecting the words novel and short story.

Gerald Murnane: There’s a piece in Invisible yet Enduring Lilacs that I first presented and delivered as a speech. I wrote conscientiously wrote for months about the effect on me of Proust. It started out as autobiography, but most of it is just pure fiction. I can’t say that I ever experienced half the things I wrote about in that, but it made for a good piece of writing. I presented it as an essay, but I would comfortably put it in a book of fiction. That suggests to me, if not tells me, that there is a very fine line between the two.

WH: This way you have come to understand the act of writing…

GM: I’m no closer. It’s a mystery. When you start to put down words your own personality becomes fractured. You’re never quite sure what part of you the words are coming from. It’s a fairly trite statement, but you begin to question the reliability of memory or even experience itself. What emerges from the writing is something that could never have been predicted. This is the magic, that writing is unpredictable. It leads to discovery, and that is a word that is overused and has a sort of twee sound, and it’s not a word I feel comfortable with. But you learn from writing things you couldn’t possibly learn by any other means.

To read this entire extensive interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 3...

An Interview with Vladimír Godár

Taylor Davis-Van Atta: You have described Béla Bartók’s music as “a kind of milk” for you. Can you elaborate on how Bartók’s music has informed your thinking and your evolution as a composer?

Vladimír Godár: As a child, I went to a school where I specialized in mathematics, studied piano, and listened to rock music. The worlds of numbers, words, and sounds interested me. I was twelve when The Prague Spring occurred, and it was then, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, that I realized that the world of words was the main harbinger of shameless lying, so of the two remaining worlds—of numbers and of sounds—I chose the world of sounds. In fact, it was Bartók’s music that was the impulse for this decision. Initially, I admired his music’s expression, and later on its ideal balance between rationality and spontaneity, expression and construction, between contemporary and historical models, and between rational composition and oral traditions. The synthetic nature of his personality still fascinates me today. And not just me: we can hear Bartók’s influence in the ideals of many other composers whose music I enjoy: Lutosławski, Górecki, Ginastera, Piazzolla, Kancheli, George Crumb, and so on. The universality of Bartók was masked for too long by Adorno’s assertion that the polarity of Schoenberg and Stravinsky was the key to contemporary music. To discover Bartók’s significance, it is necessary to thoroughly critique Adorno’s ideas.

TDVA: One of the most beautiful movements of Querela Pacis is entitled “A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times.” This movement seems to me as much an elegy to a bygone era and culture as it is a lament to what that old way of life has been replaced with: that is, a lament to today’s disposable culture. Art is highly marginalized in Western culture—and increasingly so in world culture. Even though most of the major oppressive political regimes of the past century have fallen, it seems to me that we now engage in a form of self-censorship, wishing to remain distracted rather than engaged. Do you believe it is possible for art to engage with the mass public today?

VG: Thomas Tomkins composed his virginal work “A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Times” two weeks after the King of England, Charles I, was beheaded on February 14, 1649. Perhaps he wanted to designate that period in history which was without rules, when violence and terror were everyday occurrences. Today, mass murder, possible because of the latest scientific discoveries, is being legalized by journalists, politicians, administrators of justice, and church leaders. The marginalization of art and its function inevitably accompanies our reality. . .

To read the entirety of Vladimír Godár's first English-language interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 3... 

A Conversation with Iva Bittová

Mark Molnar: What was the public reception like when you started performing?

Iva Bittová: It was very strange, very difficult. That is why I have always said that at the beginning of one’s work and process, [wide exposure] is always more difficult. If you achieve huge success immediately, then all of those things could die very soon. But, that is just my thinking. It was strange because my first productions and presentations were usually in Folk Festivals in the Czech Republic. I was acting at that time with Divadlo Husa na provázku [Goose On A String Theatre], an important avant-garde theatre. The director and the people in the theatre group knew what I was trying to do, and I was given the chance to play some characters on stage where I could include my violin and different sounds with my voice. It was fantastic. When I started my career as a musician, I only acted for a few more years and then I completely stopped because I was not happy. I was really hoping that music was the right thing for me to do. I was not meek on stage as a musician, but the audience, especially young girls, sometimes they would be smiling and saying, “What is she doing? She is completely crazy! What are these sounds? What does this mean?” But they are smiling, and I was trying to keep going and to play the whole piece. It was not like fighting, but your self-confidence leaves suddenly because you do not get a reaction that you want to accept. But I was not waiting for praise. I was thinking too much about what I was doing. And I was practicing more and more. I did not want to give up the idea. I was trying to be stronger and stronger. After about two years of performing I started to get more respect from the audience. But that was my process.

MM: Was Balada Pro Banditu part of this process?

IB: Balada Pro Banditu was a film adapted from our performance in theatre. It was the first Czech music drama on the screen, and it was very popular.

MM: When people would hear you play your songs, would the audience recognize the lyrics as poems or common folk songs that offered them a way into what you were doing?

IB: In Czech Republic, yes, but the style of it was a huge shock.

To read the entirety of this interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 3... 

The Sukhum Photos

To sit in a room on an evening and consider how to avoid thinking about madness, to sit for hours doing this, looking out of an old window not seeing anything because of the darkness of course, to look out not for that reason yet to continue looking and thinking further about how to avoid thinking about madness, about techniques of avoidance, or rather about whether the apparatus of such a technique might be inexhaustible, or rather about the possibility that the store of such techniques could be entirely exhausted, then to walk up and down in the room and, first, to consume what remains in the bottle of Unicum then to open one of beer, not thinking whether there might be another bottle of Unicum but to go on and on thinking with a glass of beer in one’s hand, sitting down in an armchair wondering whether avoiding madness might be like avoiding a heart attack and answering, yes, they are comparable…

To read this piece in its entirety, purchase Music & Literature no. 2...

Two Lost Interviews with Hubert Selby, Jr.

Paul Vangelisti: In Last Exit to Brooklyn you see there’s sometimes incredibly complex writing that was really worked, you know what I mean? Not aimed toward naturalism at all, but aimed toward musical effects and—

Hubert Selby, Jr.: That’s right, I write by ear.

PV: Orchestration.

HSJ: Yeah, Beethoven was my only conscious influence in writing that book.

PV: What got you to write “Landsend”? “Landsend,” to people who haven’t read the book, is a thing at the end. There’s one parallel in world literature that really comes close, and that’s Verga’s House by the Medlar Tree. That’s the English title. It’s about the deterioration of a family… A family of fishermen. And there are parts of the book, chapters within chapters that are written in the choral effect, where the society talks, literally. When you don’t know exactly who’s speaking. But it’s just voices. Anyway, in your book, you have a whole section like that called “Landsend” where you’re moving around within this housing project. What—why did you write that? Why did you write it that way? How did you get to write it that way?

HSJ: Well, first of all I guess get back to my basis of how I write anything. I believe that each and every piece of work makes its own demands. In other words, I don’t believe that you should develop a style and impose that on everything, that’s acting. That’s not writing. Each and everything makes its own demands and it’s up to the writer to find out exactly what the demands are and to fulfill those demands. And as that thing came to me, that was the structure it took in my head, and if I remember correctly it took me a couple of weeks just to work on the outline of what was going to go where. Because I realized, what I did was I tried to select certain attitudes that I felt would reflect the entire establishment of, not only a housing project, but this whole insane idea of a classless society. The whole idea is—that’s the whole American image, façade. Cosmetology is the thing that’s going to cure all the evils and ills of the world. And it’s absurd. So we have this myth of a classless society where we’re all the same. Look: solid, red brick. And I try to select attitudes that show what not only goes on behind the walls, but why it’s a fallacy, why it’s not a classless society, and why it fails. You see? But, you know, what are the things that keep it in balance? As I say, my only conscious influence was Beethoven. Now, what will keep this thing in balance? How will we balance the women’s chorus, with Ada, with Lucy, with Irene? What are the things that are making these people go around and do what—why do people do what they do?

To read both lost interviews with Hubert Selby, Jr., purchase Music & Literature no. 1...

A Conversation with Arvo Pärt

Jordi Savall: I find your situation especially interesting. Early on, you were composing within various traditions of the avant-garde, according to those systems. Then suddenly you decide it’s time to ask questions. You went through something like a renaissance as a composer… Since then, have you used the knowledge that you had acquired during your earlier period, or did you say: “I will never again do what I’ve already done”? Are your early works completely separate from those you’ve written since?

Arvo Pärt: Of course. We learn from the mistakes we’ve made. But unfortunately, it’s not possible to change everything we would like to change within ourselves. We lack the ability of the old masters to take off and soar. Why? I can’t say. We must adapt to our conditions. Each person must search for and find his own solution. Ideally, I would be able to write a melody with an infinite voice, a voice that carries on forever. Music that would be like speech, like a flood of thought. Thought is never pure, it’s often pierced by lightning, from without as from within. Thought is fragile. This means that our music also flows from our fragility and our inadequacies. And all this is reflected in the melody that has one voice, which is like a blood test. In music, one could say that a voice or a melodic line is like a man’s soul. In this sense, polyphony would have more to do with the idea of a crowd. The richness of the music of many voices is, however, the sum of the wealth of each of these melodic lines—as was the case in the polyphony of the great masters of the past.

For the entirety of this exclusive interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 1...

A Conversation with Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Taylor Davis-Van Atta: Your first two books were deemed "acceptable"—were reviewed and won awards—because, I suppose, they could be read as "social novels" in that they expose readers to a time in history, a culture, that is lost to most Americans, or is at least far from their own experience, which is valued by whoever is in charge of determining such things. But Draining the Sea and The Mirror in the Well, which were poorly reviewed, both in terms of the quality and quantity, are evidently not acceptable. Do you have thoughts about why your first two books received a good amount of attention and the second two got virtually none?

Micheline Aharonian Marcom: Yes, “social” novels where perhaps the reader can “learn” something about foreign places and cultures are en vogue—but only, it seems to me, if the book has a fairly easy “access” to the American reader.  And while there’s nothing wrong with reading a book and also learning about a different time and place—I too have done that through reading Homer or Hawthorne or Taduesz Borowski or Isaac Babel—I do think we ought to be wary of taking some kind of “exotic journey to foreign lands” via a novel, of facile and superficial understandings. Books are first and foremost aesthetic achievements, and they are not a sociological or historical tract or travel guide. But books do allow for a deep connection: the consciousness of a reader with the text and story of the book—and that is amazing and radical and very particular to the mode of reading.

I think Three Apples Fell From Heaven was easier to read in some ways: it is a more “character-driven” book. Whereas, the last book of that trilogy, Draining the Sea, was less about exploring character and more about how in language trauma sustains itself and manifests. It was a “language-driven” book: strange and repetitious and seeking the unknown at the edge of the known world.

The Mirror in the Well was, I'm guessing, too vulgar for most tastes with so many “cunts” and so much cunnilingus.  I think in part I was trying to rehabilitate that great Old Norse word, cunt, in the English of our time, where, especially in the US, it still has the power to shock. It’s curious how offensive it is, even in our supposedly sexually open society, to say “cunt” in literary fiction.

TDVA: For me, the artistic organization and execution of a novel is far more important any social "statement" it might make. Social novels, which I'm broadly defining as those John Hawkes wanted nothing to do with, are mainly what's being produced in the US today, and they're boring. A writer's exploration of language is what’s compelling for me. Sentences. Repetition…to the degree that words lose all meaning and before assuming new meaning. I read each of your novels as if it's a new experiment, and in each you're questioning the way in which language operates (and cannot operate). It's as if you're saying: if English cannot express the most difficult or privately hidden emotional truths, can't express the cultural toll of genocide, then you're going to draw attention to the paradox of writing in a language that cannot express truth by writing in unbeautiful, broken, corrupted language… So to my mind all of your novels fall outside of the acceptable model. Has your thinking about what a novel is and can be evolved since Three Apples Fell From Heaven? Has the exploration or interrogation of language always been what you're most interested in as a writer?

MAM: Finally, that's the issue for me: I am just so bored by a lot of current writing, I can't read it, the plots grinding along, but, as you say, the language, the sentences, flabby, like chewing gum…I'm not against realism or naturalism as a style, but so few do it really well, get the sentences to sing, are wildly imaginative, and I dislike that TV-style dialogue that is evident in so many books. On the other hand, I love the stories from The Thousand and One Nights, and Dickens and Chekhov and Bulgakov and how a wonderful and fully imagined story, written well, is a great pleasure. Left to my devices, each book for me is an exploration: how to tell what it is I'm interested in inquiring into, each form, pattern, made book by book…I follow my pen, my obsessions, and am interested in how form can be wild.

But, as it happens, I'm writing a narrative book right now and it's interesting, I’m learning in this novel to stay on top of time and move things along in a linear progression, doing it quickly to see what it looks like, feels like, and it's a story I care a lot about so that keeps it interesting: Central American migrants crossing Mexico on cargo trains to get to the US.

     I appreciate what you say about my books. I think that yes, they are seeking often to make space for the unsaid and the silences of language and history. It's always been my interest to in some ways push against English, get it to “do more” in a way. Of course Faulkner is one of my big inspirations, he taught me how syntax can be radical. Wallace Stevens teaches me that too.

I guess now I've written enough books that I feel more able to consciously “play,” but still a lot of writing in first drafts is unconscious for me, I follow my inklings, my interests, the rhythms and images I hear and see.

TDVA: Your writing has always reminded me of an essay by William Gass (“Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”) in which he talks about “fiction [as] the creation of a verbal world.” In each of your books—particularly Draining the Sea and The Mirror in the Well—there is obsessive repetition of certain sets of words and images that accumulate meaning, strange meaning that makes sense only within the context of that particular novel. I'm thinking particularly of the image of the boy tied to the cypress tree in Draining the Sea. It's perhaps the most distressing image in any of your books and it comes uninvited to the narrator's mind compulsively, resurfaces, each time carrying a bit more power, more history and memory. And its repetition lends the book rhythm. Could you talk a bit about this image? It seems as if it could be the source of the whole novel. What initiated that book for you? What were you “inquiring into”?

MAM: I would say the mind is making the patterns. There's no way I could come up with the repetition “logically” in some ways, and the book is, I suppose, interested in the natural ways in which things emerge and reemerge in the mind. How trauma is a repetitive mode in the mind. That said, I spend a lot of time fine-tuning and editing my books, when I do bring my conscious mind strongly to bear and try and make sure the book holds as a thing…as a object: that it has an arc and is not ramblings but, in fact, a book.

The image of the cypress in Draining the Sea came from the trips I made to the village of Acul while visiting Guatemala in those years I was writing the novel. And I was taken to that tree, quite an ordinary tree, but I had already read about what had happened during the time of the massacre years before, and somehow that became the central image for me of the massacre. I know when writing that one of the things books do is cull the symbolic thing, or moment, which has to stand in for a whole. And so in Draining the Sea, we return again and again to the tree, hopefully each time revealing a little bit more, the world slowly coming to life, the full impact of that awful day of the massacre felt and inhabited. But you know I forget also, it's been a long time since I wrote that book. I know at that time it was central, the men in the ditch, the tree the boy was tied to. When writing about such things I am aware that there is no way my book can “record” everything that's happened, can even, in a way, “do justice” to the suffering and tragedy of that day, that era, in Guatemala, and to all of the dead. And one image has to do a lot of work, to in some manner encode the story. Most of my work has been very image-driven: a girl walking to a well in Three Apples Fell From Heaven, the orphan boys in the sea in The Daydreaming Boy, the tree in Draining the Sea…

I think in part Draining the Sea was inquiring into what feels to me like a great loneliness in America.  The book begins: “We are more alone in this city—Marta.” And, as always, the ways in which conventional historical narratives don't contend with the real enough—for one thing, they don’t include what history feels like. I wanted in a way to collapse history in that book, make a book that collapsed space and even time and put two things side by side so that their relationship to one another could be felt and experienced. So in Draining the Sea the American man in Los Angeles and the Guatemalan girl from a small village are together. They were in many ways allied by history: Ronald Reagan and Rios Montt, the dictator in Guatemala, were partners, the bombs dropped near her village were made in Kansas. And in the book these relations, I hoped, could be seen. Could be felt.

And I guess I am always struck by how the language of oppressing the “other” is pretty standard from place to place. In my mind, the Armenians of 1915 and their descendants and the Ixil-Maya must be together in a book! And so they are…

To read the entire interview, purchase Music & Literature no. 1...