(Responding remarks following Kaija Saariaho’s presentation for the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought; The New School for Social Research, Fall 2016)
Notes on Saariaho’s Passion de Simone
Chris Stover
I’d like to begin with two quotes from the interview we read for today. First from Kaija: “When I picture certain orchestrations, I make instant connections with light.” Neither sensory apparatuses nor sensora are compartmentalized. Information flows freely between between modalities in two ways: as the visualization of sound, and as a folding-into-one-another of harmonic and light spectra.
We might draw this statement together with one a few paragraphs later, where her interviewer finds in Kaija’s music “a search for organic solutions where form and material are not two distinct elements.” Now, setting aside that this is in the context of a fairly naïve indictment on the interviewer’s part of the classical forms for which certain mid-century modernist composers were striving to find alternatives, it positions Kaija’s musical world as a fruitful place to question the nature of, and perhaps even the very existence of a binary relation between form and content, in music or otherwise. I would argue that the form–content duality is something of a fiction in any case, that music is a valuable ground for making this claim, and that Kaija’s music brings this theme into focus in a way that we should be able to project backward, forward, and laterally to account for pretty much any music-making that we experience or could imagine. Furthermore, questioning the nature of the binary does not amount to erasing the poles that name its terms. As Deleuze makes clear, and as we’ll see is amplified in the reading of Simone Weil’s life and work in La Passion de Simone, for affective spaces to proliferate we still need subject positions in order to affect and to be affected. Form and content are intimately, intricately, and irreducibly implicated in one another, but they still are discrete modalities.
A connection between orchestration and light is, of course, a synaesthetic expression. I wonder—and this is why I am drawing these two quotes into dialogue—is the form–content binary, in the way that Kaija develops it, a synaesthetic traversal as well? Is the thought–intuition binary, which she evokes a few lines later, a similarly fluid movement between modalities?
I find this possibility to be utterly compelling, since the modernist (or the post-structuralist) move to collapse the form–content distinction seems excessively violent and a bit purposeless. To make a wholesale turn in, say, Brahms to process and developing variation denies the rootedness of Brahms’s syntax along a long lineage of formal structurings that, while we must always take care not to reify into a typology, still expresses the dialectical process that sonata form, for example, had by Brahms’s time revealed itself to be exemplary. The high modernist composers of the mid-20th century sought radical alternatives to the dialectical and other teleological implications of classical forms. This is the environment that animated aspects of Kaija’s early training as a composer, about which she has some critical words: for example a recent Guardian article describes “the aridity of … the over-systemization of some species of contemporary composition”; or in Kaija’s words, "all of that complexity, and for what aural result?"
In Kaija’s words in the Mao-Takacs interview I find an appealing position between two extremes. A becoming-other of both form and content—not pure in-between, not a radical syntactic rupture, not deconstruction, and certainly not a dialectic working-out—an affective space where form and content continuously, necessarily impinge on one another. Or, to return to my original thematicization, a synaesthetic torsion of the two into one another. All of this, and much more, plays out in La Passion de Simone.
In her program notes, Kaija notes a gap between Simone Weil’s “striving for abstract (mathematical) and spiritual-intellectual goals,” as well as a discrepancy between Weil’s philosophy and her life, which Amin Maalouf brings into focus in his libretto. It is highly likely, by the way, that Weil was acutely synaesthetic.
I’m very curious to know more about the process of translating Simone Weil’s life into an allegorical passion play. The actual mappings are not hard to trace. In preparing for today, I sketched out a quick synopsis of each station of the cross in a column, and then summarized what I interpreted as the key themes from Maalouf’s libretto in a parallel column: some mappings were extraordinarily clear, even perhaps banal, others were more subtle and had to be teased out. My attention, however, was continually drawn to an emergent series of binaries: life and death in the first station, self and world in the second, devotion to mankind but deafness to those held closest in the fourth, and so on. And not only binaries, but aporias and riddles: the conflation of light and gravity (a Saariaho preoccupation too, by the way!), and the Heraclitean “to strike or be struck is one identical stain.” There are many more, but all of this folds into and is expressed by one or both of two famous quotes: from the sixth station, “As god is powerless to do good amongst mankind without the cooperation of men, it is the same with the devil doing evil…”, and repeated in both the first and last stations, “Nothing that exists is absolutely worthy of love, so we must love that which does not exist.”
If there is a gap between life and death or between self and world—for Weil these might be inflections of the same sentiment—how do we traverse that gap? How do we engage the affective or synaesthetic space that defines their relationship and co-constitution?
Weil attempts to close that gap with self-erasure, with decreation: as she writes in Supernatural Knowledge, “Our soul is separated from all reality by a film of egotism, subjectivity, illusion; the germ of Christ deposited by God in our soul, feeds upon it; when it is developed enough, it shatters the soul, causes it to burst, and enters into contact with reality.” In her “Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation,” Weil locates this reality outside the world—outside space and time. In the world—in our world of selves and others and relations—is found only a series of “absurd and insoluble contradictions.” Existence, for Weil, is an irreal obstacle to be overcome by consent, grace, turning toward the outside. By becoming-other.
In her review of Weil’s Selected Essays, Susan Sontag writes “Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant…. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.” Sontag reads Weil’s search for a transcendental reality as a turn away from truth; not toward falsehood, but in order to question, perhaps, both the ontological and ethical status of truth.
I’d like to turn, perhaps a bit too abruptly, and get into the musicological weeds for just a moment. It is taken as axiomatic in Western music theory that certain parameters—pitch and rhythm, broadly defined—count as Lockian primary qualities, whereas others—timbre or formant, loudness, quality of attack onset—are relegated to secondary quality status. Leonard Meyer laid out this structure half a century ago; Justin London reiterated it more recently, describing how we can radically change the orchestration or the type of attack onsets for a performance of the national anthem and it is still immediately recognizable as such, but if we change the pitches or rhythms it starts to lose its status as being that tune. It is easy to problematize this account even in very conventional music: are Whitney Houston’s national anthem, or Billie Holiday’s (or Charlie Parker’s!) “Embraceable You” not clearly recognizable even though a great deal of liberty is taken with both pitches and rhythms? But that is not my point here. Nor is my point that a crucial high-modernist move was to democratize musical parameters via serialization and other mathematical permutation. Nor is it the important point that Cornelia Fales made and Judy Lochhead recently reinforced about timbre-deafness among Western music scholars: a failure to notice that timbral manipulation is a practice that lends a degree of sophisticated nuance to certain non-Western music forms that is on par with harmonic and melodic sophistication in the European art music tradition. My point is that Kaija’s music succeeds not in elevating other parameters to primary status, but in rupturing the whole system of what gets to count as primary or secondary. In Rancière’s terms, Kaija’s music, like Simone Weil’s mystical thought, acts as a disruption within a pre-given distribution of the sensible that (1) draws our attention to the arbitrariness of the ways we had been doing our counting, in this case determining what counts as this or that musical parameter, thereby rendering certain aspects of music as identity-formative and others less so, and (2) opening a space for thinking about aesthetics in what can only have been what Rancière calls a representational space up to that point. After all, pitch is only sped-up rhythm, and timbre is only a superimposition of periodicities.
I’ll close with this point: it’s a truth statement to say that Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata is at least partially such because it comprises this particular series of pitches in this particular temporal configuration. A sense of the identity of “the work” is of course much more complex than this, but these are easy truths. This is equally true of Kaija’s music: there is an extremely specific temporal configuration of sounds, consistent from performance to performance and inscribable in notation. But in Kaija’s music, there is always already a decreating move whereby the truth-value of a pitch or constellation of pitches is being transformed even through the very act of being enacted. This a transcendental move: any aspect of Kaija’s music to which we might try to ascribe fixed identity is already other-than-itself. There are techniques involved in this process: of timbral mutation, of inharmonicity, and much more. Like Deleuze’s becoming-other, this does not transcend reality—it defines reality: the transcendental move is to escape the irreality of truth as what is present. Kaija’s is not the only music that achieves this—in fact, I would argue that this describes all musical process, but Kaija’s music and musical thinking does it in a way that is particularly clear and persuasive.