APP EDITORS’ NOTE:
The essay below, Otto Paans’s “Echoes of the Future: Apprehensive Aesthetics for a Bygone World,” will appear here in serial form, and then be published in full, in a slightly revised version, in Borderless Philosophy 3 (2020).
This is the second installment.
But you can read or download a .pdf of the complete current version of the essay, HERE.
And you can also read more about Otto Paans and his work HERE.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Postlude
III. Transformation
IV. Apprehension
II. Postlude
The Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov (*1937) writes music that is best described as a tone language of echoes. He assembles musical compositions consisting of fragments that appear and disappear like reflections, memories, reveries, after-images or ghosts. His 3rd symphony (1966) was titled Eschatophony, but one could apply this ominous title to many works in his oeuvre. The theme of ending is never far away, and is often present in a half-visible, foreboding manner. If anything, Silvestrov’s music evokes images of a vast and uninhabited expanse. It alludes to the space needed for creating echoes and a sense of distance. The non-linear and echoing structure of his works conjures up fleeting images of deserted shores and desolated planes. Tellingly, Silvestrov refers to some of his works as “cosmic pastorals”.[i] This apt description underlines how environmental his music is – it evokes a feeling of vastness, yet combined with an intricacy that elevates the landscape form the level of mere depiction to an enclosing, experiential ambience.
These auditory landscapes are punctuated, haunted and populated by echoes and musical citations from the past. Mozart, Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler – they all wander here, often in a guise that seems alien to their times and musical idioms.
Silvestrov invented the term “postlude” to describe some of his compositions, in contradistinction to the more familiar prelude.[ii] The prelude points forward to something that still has to come – the main part of a work perhaps. The postlude is characterized by its position after the main event has taken place. It focuses one’s mind irrevocably on the passing of the main event, and confronts one with a thoroughly open, mostly empty and seemingly desolate future. The echoes of the past serve to underline to the expanse of possibilities stretching away in all directions. They open up towards the future instead of re-iterating the irrevocably lost past.
This is all the more curious, as expectations are usually oriented towards the possibilities that the future offers. Yet, Silvestrov’s musical universe has turned 180 degrees around, so that the weight of the past hinders and stunts all temporal orientation in the forward direction. In the absence of clear direction, the presence of the past lingers everywhere, but at the same time it confronts one with a desolation that appears as a vast, empty plane that is threatening in its very spaciousness.
What happened in Silvestrov’s world? First and foremost, in these soundscapes, the traditional symphonic structure with its emphasis on thematic development cannot capture or emulate reality anymore. The orderly and coherent world that such music is supposed to represent is broken, gone and unrecognizably changed. A new structure is needed – one that emulates a world that keeps existing although its ending unfolded already. Therefore, the structure of Silvestrov’s work is an organic yet structured intermingling of tone clusters, motives and atmospheres. Especially the thematic development of the 5th and 6th Symphonies (resp. 1980–1982 and 1994–1995) is slow. Their structure sounds like it emulates an evolutionary process rather than a classical thematic development one might find in for example Beethoven, Schumann or Schubert. As musicologist Peter Schmelz has noticed, the very idea of thematic development, of achieving something or elaborating a given musical theme meets its limits here.[iii] Silvestrov’s later orchestral works unfold, but their development has little to do with symphonic development in the traditional sense. It reminds one more of a series of loosely connected auditive manifestations than a purpose-driven teleological process that culminates in a grand finale. And yet, there is a structure discernible in the texture of the music. However, it defies all attempts at characterization by using the historically inherited language of music theory.
One of the reasons for this elusiveness is another aspect of its “post” character. Silvestrov’s works (not only his symphonies) appear to exist beyond the comfortable confines of linear time or historical narrative. Their echoing character positions them beyond the one-directional flow of time. This aesthetic choice may be traced back to the isolated existence of the Soviet Union – trapped as it were behind glass in political isolation. During the 1970s and 1980s, many Eastern Europeans felt as if political stagnation had cut them off from global progress.[iv] We can find traces of this experienced inertia in works like the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic (1972), Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle (1968/2009) and Tarkovsky’s films Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979).[v] All these works deal with the effect of a frozen and slowed time, highlighting the tragic character of existence.[vi] Being itself becomes a burden when the temporal progress is removed. It is not that time has stopped, but that change, or development disappears. When every day unfolds exactly in the same manner, the very notion of a forward impetus loses its meaning. Trapped in a domain outside progress or perceptible change, the mind cannot but focus on that which is present, yet repeating ad infinitum.
Translating this experience into sound, Silvestrov’s decelerated music focuses the mind on the absolute and unavoidable presence of the musical material. The fact that almost nothing happens makes every little occurrence appear as a seismic shift. Every element, every chord, every ethereal musical theme appears meaningful because it is temporarily the only presence on which one can focus. Whether one listens to Silvestrov’s music or watches Tarkovsky’s films, it is almost impossible to avoid the impression that one is pulled behind an invisible barrier, looking into reality from the outside.
Every auditory element in Silvestrov’s tone world becomes top heavy, just as every visual element in Tarkovsky’s films acquires an almost unbearable weight. In the absence of everything else, each part of the artwork appears as something so intensely present and imposing that it defines the space in which it appears. Like the immense weight of a black hole, Silvestrov’s musical fragments distort the sense of time and space surrounding them, transforming the way in which they appear. However, and more threatening, they expose an emptiness that lies just beyond them. If anything, the cosmic pastoral shows how being is shot through with nothingness.
Being outside the confines of regular time positions the listener in an anterior space where repetition is not the mere duplication of a musical theme, but where the echo takes on the significance of something new, its penetrating novelty depending on the context in which it appears. These constellations of echoes seem to point forward – to things that will come. Especially in the symphonic poem Metamusik (1992) the piano part sounds at times strangely bright and hopeful. Combined with low brass parts, its theme evokes images of the last sunrays before an appearing thunderstorm arrives violently at the scene. In an interview for the premiere of the 8th Symphony, Schmelz stated:
In this symphony, which is intentionally devoid of ongoing drama, all you hear are the disturbing echoes of the thunder at the beginning of the work. But there’s always an edge to his symphonies, and a sense of other things going on in the distance or below the surface — the menace on the horizon that is represented by the thunder.[vii]
In Silvestrov’s world, each echo points towards the future – an image of what will come as much of what was. What this compositional practice captures is a kind of apprehension for things to come. Such sound landscapes invoke a resigned kind of hope. In the 8th Symphony (2012–2013) lyrical themes appear that again sound strangely optimistic and idyllic. They would have not been out of place in a 19th-century salon, making their presence in an otherwise dark symphonic world tragic, almost to the point of being naïve. Transformed and fragmentary as these musical themes appear, they point forward towards to the possibility of a new world arising from the debris of the old one. One has to start over, but not from scratch.
Two environments intertwine in Silvestrov’s music: the echoes of the past (notably those of the Romantic era) punctuate the ambient sounds that form a background. The shifts between foreground and background create a dynamism in which the stasis of repetition is cancelled: each echo emerges, disappears, and re-appears somewhat different. This effect feels invites a foreboding atmosphere because it makes instability and discontinuity audible. The certainty of thematic musical development has disappeared, and what is left is a world that is inherently unpredictable. The puzzle pieces are there, but one can no longer be certain how they fit together.
Throughout the 5th and 6th symphonies, as well as in the Metamusik, the auditory world of Silvestrov sounds almost if someone set the workings of Schopenhauer’s Wille to music. Ceaselessly transforming, evolving, manifesting and mutating, the thematic material struggles to remain, only to disappear again in the orchestral background. Sometimes these themes return – and Silvestrov makes it masterfully appear as if they manage to return. Sound begets its own autonomy in his compositions, behaving almost as a field of forces. In this sense, Schopenhauer and Silvestrov share a common language: they both depart from an autonomous force that manifests itself and that succeeds in uprooting the usual coordinates of cognition. Schopenhauer famously wrote that usually, one perceives the world through the principium individuationis or the “veil of Maya”. The core idea is that our world is one of appearances, but that it takes a special moment of insight to apprehend the universe that lies behind them. In a moment of grace or enlightenment, one peaks beyond the veil directly into the structure of reality itself.[viii]
The artistic idiom of Silvestrov deploys a kind of purposive contingency to achieve the effect of a creeping force that permeates reality. The echoes that characterize his music seems at first sight random and without structure. It appears as if they are arbitrary figments of sound existing in a void. By listening closely, the listener succeeds in gradually perceiving patterns, however fleeting they are. The patterns appear as a mild surprise – one must pay attention to hear them, let alone to figure out an overall structure that ties the symphonic structure together. Silvestrov provides such a structure, but it emerges gradually and inconspicuously out of the material. What looked like auditory detritus at first sight appears to be a symphonic structure that possesses its own rhyme and reason. The apparent contingent pieces (or should one say “ruins”?) of music turn out to have a structure of their own, one that does not answer to preconceived norms, but that are strangely recognizable.
Silvestrov demonstrates this point by showing a field of musical forces at work – the autonomy of these forces is captured in sound, much like the iron fillings capture the structure of a magnetic field. Like an observer seeing the patterns form, the listener is witness to the unfolding of Silvestrov’s music only afterwards. The “post” character of Silvestrov’s music is reflected into the listener. It makes the listener an uneasy inhabitant of a world that exists – or persists – after its end has occurred.
The historical format of the symphony makes the progress and thematic development of themes easy to understand. A theme in a traditional symphony is usually introduced, further developed in the exposition, and then it recurs. This traditional structure makes the notion of progress intelligible through variation and repetition. The echoes in Silvestrov’s music undercut this developmental process. One must apprehend the emerging presences of echoes, tiptoeing from one event to another in a world that is fundamentally “off-balance”. Sometimes it appears as coherent, sometimes as disjointed, foreboding or unfathomable.
In the decelerated worlds of Silvestrov, Solzhenitsyn and Tarkovsky, the unassuming building blocks of everyday reality are magnified and placed under close scrutiny. By progressing in this manner, normality itself loses its self-evident character. It can no longer be taken for granted. The inertia of decelerated reality becomes top-heavy – the unbearable weight of being is felt as an inescapable presence.
This artistic tactic transforms reality instead of replacing it or questioning it. Silvestrov’s music is an “after-sound”, just as a bright flash produces an after-image on the retina. The auditive residue of history metamorphoses our relation to reality, subtly shifting what counts as normal. At some point, the metamorphosis reaches a point where the very word “normal” loses its customary meaning and starts to open up in new directions. The world itself appears as a repository of remnants. Tarkovsky visualizes this thought with his imagery of the Zone in Stalker and the landscape in The Sacrifice. Inert, drab, deteriorating, falling apart and yet curiously unchanging, Silvestrov’s and Tarkovsky’s worlds capture a sense of decay that subsides in the background, yet interferes from the periphery of perception, pushing itself inevitably into the center of attention. In Roadside Picnic, this sense of encroaching alienation is made effective since nature is allowed to run its course, while the artificial landscape is inevitably decaying. The original novel describes the Zone in its decaying presence:
The houses in the Plague Quarter are peeling and lifeless, but the windows are mostly intact, only so dirty that they look opaque. Now at night when you crawl by, you can see the glow inside, as if alcohol were burning in bluish tongues. That’s the hell slime radiating from the basement. But mostly it looks like an ordinary neighborhood, with ordinary houses, nothing special about it except that there are no people around.[x]
Two worlds collide: that of nature flourishing, while civilization and man-made purposiveness retreats. In the case of Roadside Picnic, another life form has moved in, but it is not the type of life we are used to. Its presence distorts an otherwise ordinary neighborhood. Likewise, in Silvestrov’s music, civilization is present through musical fragments written by the prime artists the Western tradition, but their works are metamorphosing into something that is unsettlingly distorted.
That there is a theological dimension to this world-picture should not surprise. Silvestrov’s music depicts a world that is broken, much like Tarkovsky’s cinematic world. It represents an Eden just after the Fall. If anything, the current of events that animates the world has ceased, leaving only remnants and echoes behind. Yet, in Silvestrov’s music, there is also an element of redemption, a ray of sunlight that pierces through an overcast sky. The apprehensive echoes point forward to a world that could become new – a new heaven and new earth. The aesthetic of echoes introduces an ethical dimension: it shows that whatever is lost, the world remains. Those inhabiting it have to deal with a new mode of existence – one in which the consciousness of everything that cannot be retrieved is painfully present. The postlude is a world in which absence itself is present. This very gap changes how the present is being experienced. It appears as incomplete, its inhabitants as lacking or missing out. Yet, this very absence creates the space for adopting a new mindset towards the future.
NOTES
[i] Schmelz 2014: 237.
[ii] Such as the Postludium for violin (1981) and the Postludium for cello and piano (1982).
[iii] Schmelz 2014: 234–236.
[iv] Schmelz 2014: 234.
[v] This film was based on the Strugatsky brothers’ novel Roadside Picnic.
[vi] Tarkovsky published a book on filmmaking in 1986. Its title is Sculpting in Time, the term Tarkovsky used to describe his art.
[vii] Serinus 2016.
[viii] Schopenhauer 1969: 17, 113, 253, 257.
[ix] Strugatsky and Strugatsky 2012: 21.
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