Owl and Bača/Griffiths' *when the time comes*
The painting of Owl, protagonist of *when the time comes*, is by violist/painter Chiu Chen Liu.
In Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Johann Peter Hebel’s “Unverhofftes Wiedersehen” he says (paraphrasing) every turn in the action is motivated by a death.
I like that, but I drill down further. For me every turn, for example, in Trevor Bača/Paul Griffiths' *when the time comes*, is in the light of an obeisance to a primal scene. A memento mori is just one example of such.
In *when the time comes* that obeisance is everywhere and nowhere.
An obesiance that is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
The brilliance of Trevor Bača's magical music is in that it resounds with a firm acknowledgement that it is in counterpoint with the sound of one hand clapping.
East-West resonances: see my bits about Tristan chord/dominant 7 chord (inversions of one another) as the Western yin/yang.
Somewhere in Albert Salomon's collected writings, likely in the essay on Weber, the point is made that Kafka and such are in a space that is extremely introverted, a moment of anomalous introversion caused by the rising irrationality (a singularity, a zero in the denominator) running up to the first world war. (We are again in a phase of untenable irrationality.) To me, that degree of introversion is normal and right; to an extrovert it will seem weird. Walter Benjamin & I are in that Kafka space and to us the extroverts seem very strange. Joy Zinoman & Nancy Robinette's treatment brillantly crosses the spectrum of Schiller typologies, or Yeats A Vision typologies -- flickers between points of view.
Aurum Potable -- the joke on the world is swallowed whole.
A separate issue -- someone close to the production found Chiu Chen Liu's image both charming and unsettling, saying that for him, "unsettling is a good thing". I suppose that unsettling quality is in that Chiu Chen has the owl inside the window looking out at the moon. This like those unsettling images, painted by analysands, of trees whose brances dip down, back into the earth with the roots.
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