Iris ter Schiphorst

Vergeben/Bruchstücke zu Edgar Varèse (Forgiven / Fragments on Edgar Varèse) (2007)

written for the WP. for Nov. 2007, theme 'Double'

The framework theme 'Double' and the requirement to refer to an existing composition immediately appealed to me. It gave me the opportunity to approach the composition process in a different way.
I found it particularly exciting that it 'incidentally' touched on questions that I had dealt with many years ago, such as the relationship between listener and a musical work in the 'age of technical reproducibility'.

At the time, I had read Roland Barthes with great passion, where it says at one point:
"Traditional societies knew two places of listening, and two alienated ones at that: the arrogant listening of the superior and the servile listening of the inferior. A free society is unimaginable if one accepts in advance to maintain in it the old places (and patterns) of listening: those of the believer, the disciple and the patient."
It was the time when I discovered 'new music' for myself - and I remember how disappointed I was when I thought I recognised certain Barthean attributions ('arrogant' or 'servile' listening) even in this circle.

I had actually always been of the opinion that it was less a question of listening 'after' a meaning attributed to the work by some authority than of trusting one's own senses and giving space to one's own hearing.
I had always dreamed of a 'dialogical listening', an 'active' processual listening that does not 'come to a standstill' in understanding, or rather or ends in silence, awestruck by the greatness of the works of art, but rather 'continues to listen', following the traces they leave behind in the body. Of a listening that makes writing.

For 'Vergeben (Forgiven)...' I took up these thoughts again and tried to incorporate them into my compositional process.

As the instrumentation was more or less predetermined (winds, percussion and piano), I very quickly had the idea of referring to Varèse, whose two pieces 'Équatorial' and 'Désert' were wild and raw in my memory and had evoked a strong physical reaction in me in places. This is exactly what I wanted to pursue.

I got hold of recordings of the pieces and listened to them again and again. Then I simply cut out everything that didn't fit in terms of instrumentation or didn't 'say anything' to me. From what was left, I then selected the parts that made the strongest impression on me, that touched me the most.
I began to 'play' with these small pieces; interlacing them with each other, layering them on top of and underneath each other, slowing them down or speeding them up, assembling them the wrong way round etc..., In other words, I reassembled them according to my 'ear-sense', my 'listening pleasure', freely adapted from Roland Barthes, regardless of content or semantic references: "The pleasure of the text, that is the moment when my body follows its own ideas - because my body does not have the same ideas as I do..."(1973). Some of these fragments gradually mutated into refrain-like formations during this process, others demanded additional material - it was only later that I read in Riemann's work that the term refrain translates as 'fragment' - until, little by little, my piece emerged, for which Varèse's two pieces were indeed 'fragments'.
Varèse's pieces were the 'initial impulse' (i.e. material that had long been 'taken' under copyright law), but with which it no longer has much in common. Even if this other shines through in some places.

← back