Trevor Bača and Paul Griffith's *when the time comes*
“The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.” -- Schopenhauer
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.” -- Walter Pater
"Literature can learn from music." -- Paul Griffiths
Composer Trevor Bača and writer Paul Grifitths are collaborating on
*when the time comes*
for actor and Cygnus
Cygnus eagerly awaits the completion, estimated to be around the end of this year, 2023. Performance details tba.
Paul Griffiths is interested in Oulipos. His let me tell you is in Ophelian, using only the words spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
Hans Abrahamsen's musical treatment of "let me tell you"
I've been discussing Oulipo with composer John McLachlan and other musicians. The unique and enviable transparency of music was noted by Schopenhauer and Pater. We soon get to the question -- how broad can Oulipos be when applied to music? A musical theme is Oulipian, but in the true spirit of Oulipo, or by extension or analogy?
imagining in a context
It would be a grave mistake to forget to mention a concept from Ben Boretz -- "imagining in a context". Imagining in a context comprises many modes including the Oulipian mode. He mentioned it to me in connection to what Elliott Carter did and to the way Babbitt worked with arrays. Add to that Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony (major triads) and such.
Trevor Baca has a fascinating attitude toward these musical questions, which is why he & Griffiths found each other. This is not their first collaboration. I am still getting acquainted with Bača's contexts. He was drawn to Xenakis when he was young, another shared interest with Griffiths.
From his Yale University faculty bio page:
American composer Trevor Bača (*1975) grew up in Texas. His concerns as a composer include lost and secret texts; broken and dismembered systems; sorcery, divination and magic; and the effects, action and beauty of light. Bača’s music has been played throughout the world with recent performances in Barcelona, Berlin, Boston, Cincinnati, Cologne, Curitiba, Darmstadt, Helsinki, Huddersfield, Leuven, Ljubljana, Los Angeles, Lyon, Maastricht, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Thessaloniki, Tokyo, Trieste, Würzburg and elsewhere.
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