Mum Drums & symbols

MICHAEL NYMAN

Musical instruments are made more fascinating by their many in-built properties. Some people find it difficult to listen to modern music written for conventional instruments because they cannot rid themselves of the memories of the same instruments playing nineteenth century music; their responses are clouded. For this reason they may like electronic music whose sounds, they maintain, are new, and have no history. It was John Cage who made possible the massing of all sound-producing means, respectable or otherwise, into a vast potential instrumentarium, in which a threepenny plastic sn:tkewhistle is as 'valid' as a trumpet, a bowed rubber band no less worthy than a cello.

That is why all sorts of oddities crop up in the Scratch Orchestra (about which I wrote last week). It is not, however, the reason why in Peter Maxwell Davies's new work—Vesalii Icones, for dancer, cello and Pierrot Players, first performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last week—you could have heard, amongst other things, such eccentricities as a typewriter, an out-of-tune piano, a huge bellows and a set of Sanctus bells. These are used not for their intrinsic sound qualities but because they mean something (it is a rare pleasure to be able to answer the question 'What does music mean?') to Davies personally and in the context of the work.

On the out-of-tune piano, for instance, the dancer plays an oily chromatic Victorian hymn which, in context (the work is a fusion of the Stations of the Cross with the re- presentation of fourteen anatomical illustra- tions by Vesalius of 1543) represents the Mocking of Christ in a manner which the composer finds to be 'almost the ultimate in blasphemy'. He had used a similar technique in Eight Songs for a Mad King (performed in the same concert) which ends with a splendid image of a bass drum hit with what appears to be a cat-'o-nine-tails, which appo- sitely combines the idea of flagellation with a funeral drone.

To Davies's allusive mind, music has become a vast game of private symbolism. where objects are not used as objects but as symbols. This is nothing new. Mediaeval composers were taken up with larding their music with obscurantist symbols, inaudible musical puns; Schweitzer discovered, wrongly or rightly, a whole host of illustrative symbols in Bach; Schumann's music is riddle with cyphers and codes, and about fifteen years ago composers became so obsessed with the number twelve (the number of chromatic notes in a serial tone row) that it took on a mystic significance and was imposed for no other reason on other elements, rhythms, colours, dynamics.

But a Maxwell Davies musical plot is a more complex allegory, exploiting both the ambiguity between the old and the new, and literary or visual analogies. As an example. let me quote the following in which the com- poser relates his music to the analysis of Vesalius' drawings: The raw material . . .

is then bem to resemble a Schenker analysis.

but instead of stripping off layers et music to expose ultimately a "common- skeleton beltm. the "skeleton" is heard first, and

levels are added—but when it would just about become clear to a perceptive ear that the analysis concerned is of the Scherzo of the fifth symphony of Beethoven. the flute

twists the "Ecce Manus" fragment into a resemblance of the Scherzo of the ninth-- it is a related but false image.' (This for the eighth station. St Veronica wipes his face.) Such sophistication was lost on my ear at first hearing (which is of no importance for composers fold all sorts of ingredients into their puddings and souffles which are not perceptible to the taste.) But I got the im-

pression that, in the network of reference and cross-reference, too many ingredients can he self-cancelling, for the actual sound of the music was very simple, straightforward, easy on the ear. It seemed to tap a vein of lyricism reaching back to the Leopardi Fragments and String Quartet of distant memory, a vein which I felt had been filled to bursting with injections of foxtrots and calculated hysteria in the last few years.

In layout the work is a sort of cello con- certo. with the soloist. Jennifer Ward Clarke.

swathed in the folds of an abbess's white habit, and the tuneful cello writing fre- quently yearns back to the good old days when cellos sang rather than scraped or shreiked--this in the original music as well as in the deliberate pastiche where ex- quisitely intoned cantilenas were lapped by washes of arpeggios. Occasionally these were broken into by flurries of all-systems-go music of no great complexity.

1 found this overall blandness very odd as Davies had chosen the cello 'because that instrument with its taut strings and shape suggested one of those awful torsoes stretched out in the quite terrifying Vesalius illustrations.' The illustrations are terrifying.

the music deliberately not. Davies's ap. proach in this work is thus diametrically op- posed to the Mad King. For in that work some rather harmless poems, noddy-headed but not mad, were blown up to proportions of a frightening hysteria (at least in the first performance), whereas the explosive Vesalius drawings have somehow been de- fused and rendered harmless.

I am not sure of the reasons for this, but it did put a very great burden on the astonishing dancer, William Louther. from the Martha Graham Company (whose presence drew a star-studded audience from Nuryev downwards). Louther's black body.

when motionless at the beginning of each tableau, presented precisely those outlines of muscle and sinew that one secs in the stripped down carcasses of Vesalius. His performance was virtuoso—feline and virile.

graceful and grotesque, sylphlike and spastic: with a subtlety of control as delicate as a hairspring. he seemed to change direction in the fraction of a second on a pinhead. For about half a dozen numbers this was fascinating, yet one waited in vain for something significant to happen in this series of static tableaux :the presence of this big black image gradually destroyed itself,

unsupported by anything so crude as 'background' music. This, again, is the reverse of Mad King where I felt that the King and his music were, if anything, too close, too graphic.