La Comète
Partita No. 3 for solo guitar
‘La Comète' (Partita No. 3 for solo guitar) emerged from conversations with a dear friend from graduate school, now a scholar of French literature and culture at UC-Davis Claire Goldstein. Early in the pandemic, Claire sent a text asking if I knew anything about Jacques Galot's 'La comète'; I didn't, but some research showed an unremarkable piece from a minor figure associated with the court of the Sun King. I was a bit puzzled why she would be looking at this piece and her response was eye-opening. Claire's work concerns the court of Louis and associated literary and cultural responses to the comets seen over France in 1664-5 and 1680-81. At this point in Louis XIV's reign, the metaphor of the king's 'gravitational' force ordering all action had extended from the elaborate social structures within the court into broader society in political, economical, and aesthetic domains.
For Claire, the arrival of these comets into the night sky are events that crystalize social formations contrary to “the sun” (sun king), in particular, the place of the bourgeoisie as a place for cultural production that is different from the court in counterpoint to the "sun king" cult and its highly organized vortex of official culture. In short, the shocking arrival of these comets shocked all, and was taken up in many places through the kingdom, but was never to be discussed at court. What happens when people look at something that is at the time fundamentally impossible to assimilate via available matrices, and what does that generate in terms of experience, genre, style, networks of affiliation?
Claire and I became close in our time at UPenn. We were both regular attendees at a material culture seminar there, and would often hang out afterward, sharing little discoveries and resonances, from the seminar to her discursive domain, to my domain.
As our conversation on her work continued over a few weeks, I felt compelled to respond, to honor our history of playful interest in connections and slippage between disciplines and discourses, and so, given the hyletically thin nature of digital communications, a vast geographical distance, and the challenge of the pandemic, I was left with only one acceptable and feasible medium: 20 minutes of solo guitar music.
As with my other Partitas, the work is in five movements: The first, a royal dance; the second, a nocturne interrupted by the night-speech of stone and tree, and showers of meteors, startling but not as disruptive as the comets; the third movement, an anxious Brownian motion among the members of the court, trapped in the palace, bouncing off of each other; the fourth, another nocturne, with a delicate theme, a soggetto cavato of Claire's name; the fifth, a transformed version of Galot's piece, as if returning after a few centuries moving, somehow slowly and quickly, along its great parabola, heard now in different ways.
(An audio lived capture can be found HERE.)