Sometimes I wish I would suddenly forget all the music I have heard during all these years. Sometimes I wish my ears would never trigger any thought. Sometimes I wish my touch would not pass any information through nerves when approaching a white key. Sometimes I wish my blood pressure wouldn’t become higher and I wouldn’t start hyperventilating when approaching a climax. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t know what a Sarabande is. Sometimes I just wish to know what I am actually doing. It has been so many years. So many possibilities of escape. But here I am, sitting before a black mirror. Sorting out once more the misery of learning an invented language which is nevertheless dead forever, locking myself into a wooden prothesis which makes my body fight between the stiffness of the white limit and the wish for any kind of freedom and inflecting self-slavery every day of my life since I can remember.
What would be of those dots and lines without my self-slavery? What would be of those sounds without my blood pressure? What would be of that wooden furniture without me crying for it? Wood, paper, ink, noise, flesh.
1841, Leipzig
Surely, I can sight-read this. Easy. I approach my fingers to the wood and start pressing keys. Many need to be pressed at the same time, there are few which try to escape the dictatorship of homophony. Right away, an imitation. A bit hidden. It is comfortable, my fingers seem to like it, they don’t need to coordinate in impossible combinations. My breath is stable, serene, moves in slow waves, but a hint of destructive nostalgia invades my body. Nostalgia is forever distant, as distant is the codified, hieroglyphic language of ferne Philosophie. In some moments, I seem to be hanging by a thread, suspended in air. My feet dig into the floor and my bottom tries to reach heaven. In dissonance. But soon a little modulation which doesn’t allow anything, but the bitter taste of disappointment. One time. Two. Three. Breath faster, deeper finger pressure, fingers start to incoordinate. Repetition. Noch einmal. A recap is like a present you have expected for a long time, but which ends up being the ugly shoes you already have hidden at your room. But this one is somehow special. A risky jump. I sound hasty, but nevermind, the dissonance is heavenly. Sadomasochism. Und nochmal. Fingers stop. Hände weg. Totemic silence. Comeback to uncodified noises.
Philosophy is prose. Its consonants. Distant philosophy sounds like poetry – because every call into the distance becomes a vowel. On both of its sides or, surrounding philosophy, lies + and minus poetry. Thus, in the distance everything becomes poetry-poem. Actio in distans. Distant mountains, distant people, distant events, etc., everything becomes romantic, quod idem est – from this results our essentially poetic nature. A choir lies also in the untouching place of distance. In time and language. Their language lies far. Incomprehensible sounds articulated in dead grammars. Thus God. The mystical lamb, which embodies all possible meanings, because we can’t formulate his language.
***
Any sound can be preceded, sound simultaneously or be followed by any other sound. The success of the project will depend on the contextual and formal conditions and the dexterity and spirit of the composer. Let’s observe the flow of time:
The fourth is sometimes positioned as a foundation; but when this happens, the fourth has a bond of relative rather than absolute compatibility with the other consonances of the harmony.
Fourth intervals are ambiguous, because any member of the chord can function as a fundamental. Thus, 4ths chords are rarely used as dissonant structures, because of its intervallic construction.
1925, Moscow
I open the score. The paper looks blacker than I would desire. Nevermind. Notes carry me away. That’s sight-reading. You seem to be in a train in which you only see coloured lines that never form into landscape. In any case, I try. Lots of demi-semi-quavers, very slow though. Weird crossings and jumps. Oh, no, I missed that chord. What’s that note on the bass? Can’t even read it. Oh oh oh, messy chord, will I be able to read it? …saved. Again crossing. Wait, some things seem to be repeating. Can’t really decode it, but something lies there. Don’t think, play! You see? You missed the climax! I’ll practise a bit the scale right before and will try to play it again. Again the scale. Again. Now… jump! Okay, done. Again the climax repeated? That feels strange.It has a metal flavour, a machine scent. Beginning slowed down. Descent into darkness.
Okay, I will try again. In fact, everything seems to repeat a couple of times, even the climax, as if it was an imposed rule, a mechanical form of architecture, trying to get away from my breath and my moves. Do machines express something? Everything repeats anyhow two times, invariably. I didn’t realise when I heard it before on YouTube. Wait, wait. Why is suddenly everything made of fourths and sevenths? Wait. 4 + 4 = 7. A hidden network of infinite colourful fourths starts to appear under my eyes. A spider web crossed by moonlight and smoke. But as long as I keep playing it seems that my arms become loser and I need to sit deeply on the bench, as if embracing the wooden elephant. I seem to perform a ritual in which motors, angles, and mysterious forces seem to take themselves by the hand. I love the ending. Feels like being free. Feels like inflicting violence on the wood, giving back to it my tears. I feel powerful.
Ancient life was all silence, but with the invention of machines, Noise was born. To be convinced of the variety and beauty of noises, one needs only think of the rumbling of thunder, the whistling of wind and of the full, solemn and white breath of a city at night, when all lights are switched off and noises appear in shyness. When space is given for their appearance:
I call you to life, O mysterious forces!
Drowned in the obscure depths
of the creative spirit, timid
shadows of life, to you I bring audacity!
***
1922, Frankfurt
An antique ostinato. Where bows and jumps are no longer. Where one cannot expect the skirt to accidently reveal secrets, because there ought to be no secrets. Where joy is frivolity. When men have died along and along, what is left is the sobriety of night. A night that passes by and takes us up in penelopian possession. In smoke glass. In tears. Glass full of Irish whisky. Cigar smoke. Blue notes which nevertheless penetrate like a needle and slowly cross my epithelium, then my muscles and my blood vessels. Always an antique, hypnotic, dangerous ostinato, which slowly cancels my thought, my moves. Just my breath is left, that same breath which was taken from millions of men, succumbed to the promise of light and motors. The sound of spilled blood and moans is no longer dissonant, sevenths and ninths take place on our daily sequence. No scandal, no outrage, no chance of hearing calling voices. Therefore a man, who got back for himself a music to his measure, to his night, to his time. A time where poetry ought to be possible, one should only ask which kind. Poetry which carefully takes you by the neck and makes you watch through the window. A book of revelations.
As our airplanes grew even better
We flew yet higher and higher
The oceans were soon mastered
And even the mountains humbled.
I had been seized with the fever
Of building cities, and of oil.
And all my thoughts were of machines and the
Attainment of even greater speed.
I forgot in my exertions
My own name and identity
And in the urgency of my searching
Forgot the final goal I sought.
But I beg you
To come to me and
To give me water
And place a pillow under my head
And to assist me, for
I do not wish to die.
P.F.B., N., V.P., J.B., L.R., A.S., B.B.