I wasn't having a good evening at all; it had been a very trying afternoon at work, and just before I called it a day, I got some - you can't even really call it bad news, but that's how I took it, and everything went downhill from there. The clocks have just gone back here - so it was already almost dark when I finished for the day; it was pouring with rain - again - and I was thoroughly cold and miserable. I wasn't doing anybody any good with my presence, so I withdrew upstairs and tried unsuccessfully to get warm: but my extremities were just frozen now, and all my attempts at insulation achieved was keeping the cold in.
And lo... I spent fifty-seven minutes in the company of the Syntactical Ghost Trance 12tet... and I emerged transformed. This is a true story.
***
I have thought quite a bit recently about why my reactions to Syntactical Ghost Trance Music should be so different from my reactions to B's operatic works - which I still can't seem to befriend... this year has seen me take in a great deal of new (to me) music from B's massive oeuvre, including a very sizeable proportion of the NBH material; but I've only really dipped a toe into the Trillium seas, and didn't (yet) go any further. I couldn't - I can't - penetrate it. Out of all his music, only this and (arguably) the solo piano music remain too difficult for me to get inside - and the solo piano music is still something I can at least listen to, albeit sparingly. The opera - it doesn't help of course that I couldn't stand opera to begin with. I have very limited experience of it, and that's basically the way I planned to keep it... of course this is the maestro's opera, and that makes a big difference - in theory, anyway: in practice, I don't seem to be able to get into it yet. It also doesn't help that - unlike my colleague McClintic Sphere - I've never seen any of it performed, and the glimpse of it that is provided in the recent film by Kyoko Kitamura suggests that watching it performed is the only way to go, really.
It needn't be a huge surprise to anyone who's read any of my blathering over the years that I would struggle with (creative) vocal music, even when B. is writing it. But this does not seem to apply to SGTM at all. On the contrary, I find this absolutely delightful - and always have, from the first time I heard it performed. Here, though, the human voice is above all just being deployed as another instrument - even when it is being used to utter identifiable phonemes. Because of the increase in my daily workload recently, I have found less time for exploring new music, and have thus far only got halfway through the giant 12-disc set which documents these works; but the ones I have heard have all proved extremely enjoyable, something I can't yet say about the operatic works. Still, the next opus on the list happened to be Comp. 254 - which is both much featured in KK's brilliant video, and unusually replete with segments of actual text. (Some of this is almost certainly from the full libretto of Comp. 173, some of it may be from 172 or 174; some of it presumably must derive from one or more of the operas themselves..?) Would this prove more challenging for me than any of the previous five readings..?
- But the answer is: no, apparently not. In this context, even written text given voice proves no more challenging to my ears than any of the other utterances to be found here - and these are many and varied, to say the least. The actual words are quite witty, of course - but then, this observation can just as readily be made on behalf of the operas, and that alone has not yet been enough to win me over. Here, though, the continual juxtaposition of non-verbal utterances with the scripted lines seems to frame the latter in a wider context which is completely unpredictable and joyously chaotic. For one specific example of this, you can zero in one the passage around 25.15 and onwards, when one of the male voices begins saying "I have a vision about this period in time" - a very Braxtonian phrase, right there - and this is met at once by the most extraordinary series of sucking/clicking/lip-smacking noises from one or more of the ensemble. The entire performance is basically like this: from one moment to the next, you really have no idea where the music is going to take you. It is crazy - in the best possible way. I hadn't listened to all of the other pieces through headphones - indeed, until very recently I had gone for a number of years without really using headphones at all - but I did hear this piece that way, and didn't even attempt to give my attention to anything else while I was playing it. Just the number of times I laughed out loud with delighted amazement... The time more or less flew by, whilst simultaneously being crammed full of movement and detail -
- and it is true, long before the end of the piece I felt so much better. In all honesty, I am sure I knew deep down that this was likely to be the case, and had denied myself for as long as I did out of nothing so much as bloody-minded self-sabotage; but in any case, I was sensible enough not to keep denying myself indefinitely, and once I started, there was no stopping. By halfway through the piece, I had even warmed up at last*. The rest of the night, and the following day, had a completely different complexion from what would have been inflicted on me otherwise. Braxton saves! Hallebloodylujah, and happy halloween! 😈
* This is not an exaggeration at all, so I had probably better attempt to explain it - lest it sound as if I am actually trying to impute quasi-miraculous powers to this stuff. The music alone did not warm me up physically: rather, what it did was lift my spirits out of a locked-in, "poor me" state of determined misery and into a far more open state - in which the qi could flow freely, and the blood could follow. That would be my reading of it, anyway. Whatever the mechanism, my feet in particular had been frozen cold for hours by this point and I couldn't get properly comfortable at all. Within thirty minutes that changed completely, without my noticing at first (too absorbed in the music).
Oh, and yes, this is of course yet another interim trifle until such time as I get my act together to write about Comp. 136... but fuck it, this felt as if it was worth saying :)
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