Systematized Equivocation
Harold Meltzer's Doria Pamphili will open my upcomig Parma CD.
The sequence of encounters with the word "equivocal" is important in this case.
I wrote this for the notes, about a month ago:
“Doria Pamphili” develops seamlessly, loops back on itself. The opening theme appears two more times at the end, three times all told. Call the second appearance a false recap. (In measure 81) It is oddly twisted, the D natural on the guitar’s open fourth string working against the D# in the tune. It’s a gentle moment. It’s not really sad, not tormented. Perhaps we might say it is deeply equivocal? Details in the heart of the work are arranged just so, in order to make this moment believable.
Last night I was paging through "Music and Morality in Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse", by Gw Fieldm, where I read--
Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Mann's Dr. Faustus, find that "music is systematized equicocation".
That's all.
I don't like quoting Leverkühn. I have never felt the need to prove Leverkühn prophetic about anything, but here I find Meltzer proving Leverkühn right, and must admit that the theme -- the leitmotif of equivocation -- is utterly organic.
I read Dr. Faustus about 20 years ago. Time to re-read.
Here, in "Doria Pamphili" is the new, seamless, Meltzer. "Brion" -- nested arch forms, the stones always arching back to the pastoral scenethat appears three times, crepuscular at the end.
It occurred to me recently that Lang's Little Match Girl has a similar quality. It accrues in discrete stones. I was delighted to find Lang making sections with a very striking and unique sound. It might even be possible to say that each section is. redolent of a set class.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey