Introduction

From Morton Feldman to Luciano Berio, from Philip Glass to Roger Reynolds, many composers in recent times have been drawn to the work of Samuel Beckett. Berio quoted from The Unnameable in the middle movement of his Sinfonia; Feldman elicited the eighty-seven words that make up the entire libretto for an opera, Neither. Glass wrote a Beckett string quartet, Reynolds various pieces with electronics. And Earl Kim set several Beckett texts, notably in his Exercises en Route, performed here four years ago. Of tonight’s composers, Heinz Holliger set three of Beckett’s plays as chamber operas, and György Kurtág is at work on an operatic version of another, Fin de partie (Endgame).

What attracts? Perhaps a simplicity that is infinite and a vastness even at the edge ot existence. That and the voice.

Heinz Holliger (b. 1939)
Trema

Someone is urgently striving to communicate, and communicating by the urgency, as well as by the effort to control what emerges, to curb utterances as well as to speak them. It could be the protagonist of Beckett’s one-woman play Not I, which Holliger made into a piece of music theater for soprano and electronics in 1978-80, or it could be the performer of an instrumental solo such as this, which followed in May 1981, intended for the Israeli viola player and painter Rivka Golani.

Playing for twelve minutes or so, the piece is fundamentally one long, very slow progression, beginning a half-step above middle C and moving in two or three ample waves to end on the instrument’s lowest note, an octave below middle C. Upon this glacier-speed music, as in earlier works such as his String Quartet, Holliger overlays much faster actions while keeping the basic line present by means of arpeggios and exactly defined tremolos, to produce an effect, as he puts it, of “sound screens that continuously oscillate and move in different directions.” A multilayered music is created by one musician, on one instrument, and all without the use of any non-traditional technique, not even pizzicato or col legno.

John Cage (1912-92)
Seven

Nearly all the music of Cage’s last five years came as tones hovering in time.

Performers, of a number specified in the title, act independently as they place notes or chords within loosely prescribed durational frames.

In the particular case of the first sounds of Seven, for example, the musicians begin at some point in the first 45" and stop somewhere between 30" into the piece and 1' 15".

Notated for this period are five chords on the piano, three single notes on the violin, two single notes and a dyad on the viola, one single note each on flute, clarinet, and cello, and a single percussion sound.

If a performer decides, say, to start at 40" and stop at 35", the result is silence.

All the sounds notated in the score may thus be eliminated.

Or all may be played – though the density of events will still be low.

Repetitiveness is also possible, the flute, at one extreme, playing no more than six different notes throughout, all at modest dynamic levels.

At the other extreme is the piano, with a great diversity of chords.

The clarinet, like the flute, is always discreet; these sounds, the score suggests, should be “‘brushed’ into existence as in oriental calligraphy.”

The violin, viola, and cello players have to draw the wood of their bows across the strings, and the percussionist is also to make sounds by frictional means.

These percussion sounds may be chosen freely, but the other players have their notes and chords precisely indicated.

Probably the piano will provide the main continuity.

As soloist or background?

Partnerships may fleetingly arise.

Or not.

Instruments may seem to echo one another.

Or not.

Beckettian perhaps the possible echoes, the possible partnerships, as well as the clarity of design, and the strangeness, and the familiarity.

The last frame ends at 20' 00".

György Kurtág (b. 1926)
…pas à pas – nulle part…, op. 36

Exact and exacting, Beckett was always an obvious partner for Kurtág, though it was not until the beginning of the 1990s that an encounter began to take shape. Perhaps Beckett’s death, at the end of 1989, was a precipitating factor. Certainly a door was opened when Kurtág heard how a Hungarian actress, Ildikó Monyók, had learned to speak again, after an accident, by learning to sing, one word at a time, to notes given by the piano. His mind went to one of Beckett’s late writings, “What is the Word,” which seemed to be about this same kind of stumbling articulation, and he set the text for Monyók and pianist before creating around it a larger work with added groups of instrumentalists and singers to challenge, encourage, and echo (Samuel Beckett: What is the Word, 1990-91).

In February 1993 he went on to a short poem by Beckett, ‘le nain nonagénaire’, which he set for voice with string trio and percussion – a scrap that remained alone until joined by a homage to Pierre Boulez for the latter’s seventieth birthday, two years later. More settings followed, with particulary productive spurts during the winter of 1995-6 and in a period of ten days at Marlboro in the summer of 1997. Kurtág completed the cycle the following spring, placing his last setting at the beginning, the others following more or less in chronological order of composition. Most of the poems are drawn from among those Beckett published as “mirlitonnades” (kazoo snorts) in the 1970s; a couple – “elles viennent” and “Dieppe” – go back to the late 1930s; and toward the end come maxims by Sébastien Chamfort (1741-94) that Beckett translated into English, also in the 1970s. Two languages and two periods are thus involved, but one voice.

The voice performing is also singular. Lyricism is almost out of the question; instead, for the most part, the singer declaims the texts, speaks them in notes, nearly always doubled by one of the instruments. The atmosphere of the piece Kurtág wrote for Monyók is not so far away; the words are, indeed, taken into music, but it may easily seem that music, in the form of compact melodic shapes, is calling back the words, demanding them from the singer, who is the protagonist in a drama that needs no set or action because these are fully in the music.

More than they accompany, the instruments seem to cue the voice, direct the voice, underline the voice. Occasionally these instruments – the percussion set-up and the string trio who play almost throughout with ‘hotel mutes’ that cramp the sound to a thread – will seem to illustrate a word or a phrase, but their role is much more often to instigate than to react, and their combative presence may alter how we feel about our own being here. We are observers, but is it of a performance or an ordeal – an ordeal we not only witness but, being human, share in?

Step by step, the title poem indicates, we are going nowhere. The words ‘petits pas’ (small steps) in this poem are set to a three-note rising segment of the chromatic scale – an idea that will recur, along with other strikingly direct gestures. Yes indeed, we are going nowhere, because the chromatic scale has no beginning and no end. But at least we are going. There is no direction, no attainment, no goal, just a number of small steps. They may be enough. Something is happening. To quote the title of Beckett’s last work: “Stirrings Still.”

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.