Four Façades

1.

At first: breath tones and stopped harmonics, encased within frames of clear, ringing pitch. Both an exterior and what lies behind it. The long tones begin as walls but retract into edges. The noises behindbloom into the space that is left. A curtain draws back, a glass cube turns in the light. Inside switches to outside switches to inside. The composer, Judit Varga (commissioned as part of the Riot Ensemble’s 2018 Call for Scores), writes music for the screen as well as the concert hall. ‘I want to tell stories’, she says. Eventually every surface in her piece recedes: loud into soft, noise into tone, rhythm into pulse, melody into drone. ‘I do not want to work with definite words or pictures’, she says. These facades of sound are provocations, then: even as their beautyinvites us to touch and to learn, they dissolve, broken, beneath our fingers.

2.

Two men, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, drawup plans for a new Palace of Westminster. Neo-Gothic, elaborately carved in stone, it will be a medieval face for a modern seat of government. A composer, Benjamin Graves, wonders: Is this a uniquely British scruple, to hide the new behind the old? He considers Westminster’s crumbling exterior, which even now is to be renovated rather than rebuilt and he writes Romantic gestures (‘akin to Elgar, for example’) for a solo viola. Perhaps it is an enduring Romanticism that makes British music unique, he suggests. Yet old-world confidence conceals an unstable core of harmonics and multiphonics, produced outside the instrument’s comfort zone. In turn, even older styles are renovated by the new, asBaroque recitatives are viewed through a modernist prism, the ensemble playing in its own time as the viola takes the lead: four facades in all. In the end Pugin’s facade concealed more than he wanted it to: ‘Tudor details on a classic body’, he complained to a friend. Graves’s viola concludes with long figurations entirely in harmonics; background floating to foreground.

3.

A third time, from the top. ‘All conflict, all error’, writes Rilke in his Notes on the Melody of Things, ‘comes from the fact that people look for what they have in common in themselves, not in the things behind them, in the light, in the landscape, in the beginning and in death.’ Do we all live separately, on islands, as Rilke suggests? A tenor saxophone attempts an answer: melodic, timbral, percussive, every part of it made to sound, it stands in the foreground of Caterina di Cecca’s piece (anotherRiot Ensemble Call for Scores commission). Before long it begins to change its background too: small elements are transferred from its part to the ensemble, until eventually both become one and the same. This is Rilke’s image. It is not the surface ties we see – the social facade – that connect us, but deep histories. Rather than the ‘tiny bridges’ between our islands, is it actually ‘the bridges behind us’ – die Brücken hinter aus – that truly matter?

4.

And now a woman. Consumed by love, she is written into poems by Rabindranath Tagore. Four, chosen from more than one hundred published in his Gitangali, or ‘Song offerings’, of 1912. At first she begs her servants to let her sleep, wishing this particular facade to be broken only by her lover’s touch. A metaphysical longing – ‘let my return to myself be immediate return to him’ – becomes a theme. This song, it transpires, is a languorous rising upbeat to the other three. Union (ever-returning pitch centres that stabilize the music) is counterpointed with profusion and growth: ‘the butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light’, she sings in ecstasy(song two); ‘Thus it is that thy joy in me is so full’(song three). The fourth song brings another, ultimate fulfilment: the union with Death, heard inthe ping of a crotale. The songs of joy dissolveinexorably to the edges of musical space. The woman, all outward masks removed at last, ends alone.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson