Part I

i. Prologue

In many ways this work begins where Luigi Nono’s Prometeo ends – but also, in this first part, from my own music;

a free fantasy on material from ii. & iii. Where the Quiet Rest – a recapitulation of a ‘before’

ii. Parados

entry of the performers – space maturing

& their first full utterance

Part IV

ix. il y a (Levinas)

il y a – there is

Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than

feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more

than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave..

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“Sound is and is indifferent to our effort

The paradigm of tonality – its demand placed upon reality; of major and minor –

desire to know, to correct –– an accosted overtone, utilised to a position of greater function.

the third: the question, sound understood by reason (Pythagoras) or by sense (Aristoxenus)

a horizon, a limit: in this work, the site in which we encounter otherness

invited to listen for the difference which exists between each tone, each interval, each distance [topos].

There is difference

sound, only ever in-different to our effort

an attempt to feel otherness ––– hear that there is tone, voice, sonority, resonance.

–––– essential otherness, commenced by Hawwah; life, in what is

open to the encounter with an other; allow your own disruption to occur

listen to an other, as other

each day is the first day”

Part II

This scene reads Genesis as a foundational myth of otherness ––

the first human (Ha’adam) as a totality, without gender, as the etymology indicates;

the creation of an other (Hawwah) as the moment of division, essential

iii. ..a day without a day (Jabés)

Imagine the blinding confrontation of a first day of consciousness; sudden existent, without history.

(imagined in several overlapping parts; day – discord choral – blank existence; days of nothing – breath – erasure)

“Imagine a day without a day behind it, a night without a previous night. […]

him a man, depriving him of memory. .. without childhood, without past. […]

The past reassures us […] Time moulds us. Without past there is no present, and the I cannot be imagined.

Fertile forgetfulness. […] It helps us to … learn and unlearn, to take what is offered.

[…] I am not. All I have ever been is the man life has allowed me to be.”

Edmond Jabés, The Book of Shares

iv. ...and caused to fall

An image of drowsing, falling — a swirl of air, dust, and breath.

Any trace of name or agency are unsung, unheard – removed: absence underscored

–––– תַּרְדֵּמָ֛ה וַיַּפֵּל֩ עַל–––– וַיִּישָׁ֑ן ––––

and .. a deep sleep to fall upon –––– and .. slept

a clarinet figure – הָאָדָ֖ם ha’adam (all and each) – sustains the ground over which the voice sing: terrified.

sudden blinding erasure

(woken, blind, from a dream –– a moment imagined between the lines of the myth)

dreaming – a glimpse of creation; the last dream alone

v. ..and dreamt (Sweelinck)

written in the manner of an echo fantasia

An imagining of the dream had; alone, among the angels; waking to the blinding confrontation of other (woken by a fragment of a name)

a dream without experience of otherness; no conception of an-other in any sense

voices sing caution; a flute and violin

a processional at the commencement of our essential otherness

“They looked at each other without a word. What could they say? They could only observe, only study their difference.

Days of boredom, of uneasiness followed. Of anxiety too. […] Living, yet without landmarks of existence..”

Edmond Jabés, The Book of Shares

coda – recapitulation and final group utterance; falls away

note –

What is an idol? An image, substituted for an object? Can a name be idolatrous?

The image we have of another person can hold us apart from them. What happens when we name and there is no object? 

(fragments of names permeate this work, lines composed between two traditions)

Daß ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht, 

Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln. 

[…] der falschen, aus Übertönung gemachten Stille …

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?

Are we utterly estranged from You?

[…]

entitled only to experience you

in the shape of your negation.

Gershom Scholem

With a Copy of Kafka’s Trial