Rausch des Vergessens
The chamber music cycle Rausch des Vergessens (English: rush of oblivion), will consist of seven pieces with varying instrumentation, five of which are coupled with an epilogue for solo piano. Some of the pieces have already been performed, others are nearly finished, but the majority are still in progress.
The epilogues themselves are also conceived as an independent cycle.
The title of the cycle is taken from Hermann Broch's Tod des Vergil, in which the protagonist, during a climactic hallucinatory run-on sentence describes the faces and heads of passersby, in loving detail, yet fails to recognize them as people. Other than the title, however, the works have little to do with Broch himself, but are more directly indebted to the works of Gertrude Stein, the philosophy of Nicolas Cusanus and his 'periphery', and the aesthetic propositions of Mathias Spahlinger. Each piece in some way develops strategies for highlighting the process of forgetting as it plays a role in musical experience -- by attempting at various stages to re-introduce what has been forgotten, and acknowledge that it will be forgotten again.
This attitude informs the compositional process as well: I generate musical material according to certain structural principles, then set this raw material aside long enough to forget how it came about, thus forcing me to re-analyze it "at face value" and thus enact a kind of contextual fluidity that can't be contrived in any other way.
Cusanus determined, 600 years before Einstein, that any arbitrary point in the universe can be taken as the center. Through musical means I hope for at least a fleeting insight into this state of affairs, as the Rausch of oblivion knows no permanence. The vision of Cusanus, namely a completely fluid frame of reference, is the exclusive realm of non-corporeal beings. For the likes of us humans (earthbound, body-bound beings), the idea repeatedly drowns in the inertia of physical memory's metaphors. Though a moment of relief may well lie hidden in the place where forgetting and remembering are seen as parallel worlds, this moment too is forgotten in short order, and we once again dedicate ourselves to the search for truth like moths that circle a lantern.
The 'core pieces' of the cycle are:
zu eng for 12 solo strings (preliminary version completed August 2006)
zu sich for clarinet, horn, trombone, piano, violoncello, and contrabass (an excerpt was premiered at UIUC in February 2008)
All the other instrumentations will be extracted from these cores:
Fallschirm for alto trombone solo (premiered 2004 by Andrew Digby)
Kennst Du das Land? for bass clarinet, violin, violoncello, and piano
ex cusa for clarinet, trombone, cello, and piano (excerpt performed by modern art sextet in June 2005, first complete performance will be presented by Casey Dierlam and guests in Spring or Summer 2010)
n-hop for contrabass solo, with cello, horn and alto trombone.
Sleepwalkers for trombone and 12 strings
along with the five solo piano 'epilogues.' The epilogue to Fallschirm, Rosy Derivative, was premiered in February 2006 by Sebastian Berweck.
For further reading Flasch, Kurt: Nicolaus Cusanus: Geschichte einer Entwicklung (Klostermann, 1998) Dydo, Ulla: Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises (Northwestern University Press, 2003)
Santayana, George: Skepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy (Dover Publications, 1955) In particular: "The sense of existence evidently belongs to the intoxication, to the Rausch, of existence itself; it is the strain of life within me, prior to all intuition, that in its precipitation and terror, passing as it continually must from one untenable condition to another, stretches my attention absurdly over what is not given, over the lost and the unattained, the before and after which are wrapped in darkness, and confuses my breathless apprehension of the clear presence of all I can ever truly behold." (Santayana, p. 37-38)
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