On The Winter Journey

In 1998, I passed through Paris; I have begun work on my doctoral essay, 'Frangere and Fracture', a title that was, as all such ABD essay titles are, replete with a mixture of optimism and arrogance— cadence and refrain in the Montpellier Codex was the subject, and I was enthusiastic to see the codex first hand. I was visiting a dear friend, a true bibliophile, and we spent much time in many bookshops. In a dealer's shop near Mabillon, I noticed a quite peculiar folio of music manuscript paper; as my friend distracted the dealer, I surreptitiously photographed the bundle of papers; Kodachrome, as we all did in those technologically beknighted days. I had been drawn to a brief passage that seemed to evoke a favorite song of Ravel– I assumed at best it was the traces of the work of a pale competitor or an industrious student. Stowing it for later review, I continued south to view in person the Codex in its all its vibrant leathery illuminated glory.

On my return to Philadelphia, my interest in my little find continued, mostly due to the apparent quotations of Debussy and Ravel in the work– I came to Penn to study with Crumb, and any hint of quotation pricked my ears. I copied out the score, discerning notational gaps as best I might. However, my essay and dissertation composition called and my consideration of this peculiar score text was delayed and subsequently waned. And over time those physical photos were lost in numerous post-degree location changes, possibly the result of a break in to my office, one which had the obvious intent of stealing a laptop, leaving other valuable materials in the office; the laptop by chance contained the only scans of those photos. All that remained was one image (unintentionally backed up to the web), and my handwritten transcription. My curiosity returning, I reviewed my notes and transcription, and availed myself of the massive digital resources of the early 21st century, unthinkable in the late 20th when I had first seen the score.

I found, to my increasing confusion, what appeared to be an incomplete score of an opera or oratorio, as well a smaller piano piece using similar themes and devices. The opera score was incomplete; it seemed a peculiar kind of 'short score' with extensive and expansive writing for piano and a substantial percussion element, quite unheard of in the late 19th century. Even more oddly, it appeared that vocal staves had been torn from each of the pages, with only the occasional choral passage (untexted) or some text of a lost vocal part. On the bottom of several pages the name 'The Winter Journey, V.D.' and indication of what were either movements, scenes or tableaux: "In eines Köhlers engem Haus…", "Un grand sommeil noir" "The library" "O rêveuse, pour que je plonge", "Der Leiermann". There were also two related tableaux with identical indications, VRNR. The fragmented texts were familiar. The music as a peculiar melange of tonal devices and rhetorics and a free harmony that was alternately supple and then brittle fragmentary references to musical works were undeniable– Reading through these images, I recognized passages from DeBussy and Ravel (mostly songs); more shocking were seeming quote of Bartok, Stravinsky, and Crumb, with whom I had just finished studying. This puzzlement became stupefaction as I noticed watermarks on several pages setting the date as 1874, decades before Debussy and Ravel, and exactly a century before the premiere of Crumb's 'Music for a Summer evening.' The situation to me increasingly only seemed to resolve in only one of two ways: either this unnamed composer had either conceived of harmonic, technical, rhythmic, and an approach to form that prefigure music from a century later, or these composers, legends among us, had stolen material from this unknown genius.

Essays on the topic have failed to achieve publication, and so, when yarn/wire came to me with the idea of a commission, this struck me as wonderful opportunity to bring this fascinating peculiarity into musical life again. I have attempted to clarify and refine my transcription, but only to fill gaps where absolutely necessary, and to provide what narrative context can be gleaned the work's traces and artifact.

Also On The Winter Journey

Work on this piece was begun in Fall of 2016 at the invitation of Yarn/Wire. It brings together many elements which have interested me for sometime: large forms, space both sonic and architectural, narrative, and above all historicality of a particular sort — the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, the visceral immediate presence of the past. That has manifest as technical, aesthetic, and material borrowing from much early musics, and as overt or hidden connections to mythology and philosophy. Here, more recent associations pervade: music and poetry of the 19th and 20th century.

The point of origin is a minor masterpiece of 20th century literature, George Perec's “The Winter Journey.” Not quite scholarship and not quite magical fabulism, the story recounts the sad tale of a young scholar who finds the key to modern literature, a lost book seemingly the source and inspiration of every major French poet from Rimbaud to Mallarmé. Once discovered, the text disappears, lost to the displacements of war and the weathering of time. The scholar is left to a life of searching through libraries and ruins, forever seeking the recovery of a literary mystery and of a world briefly glimpsed.

Over the course of eight tableaux, the narrative is re-presented through textures and color: the scholar Vernier's arrival, the discovery and destruction of the library, the search for the text. Delicate percussion is counterposed with ferocious technical pianism, together creating textural and formal layers over the course of the piece; solos, duos, trios, and quartets emerge and dissolve into one another as an ensemble, but also as traces of the past, a history both real and imagined. Perec's imaginative playfulness is inverted, now inventing not a source or origin for a new body of literature, but a network of pieces with influences and appropriations historical and fictional.

More fundamentally but less obviously, these tableaux are woven together by myriad references and echoes— settings of Mallarmé and Verlaine by Debussy and Ravel are transformed in Mvt III. (Éventail) and Mvt. V. (Un grand sommeil noir). Crumb's Music Summer Evening appears in traces in Mvt IV. (The Library). Schubert's music, perforce, appears as bookends to the work; radical reworkings of songs from Der Winterreise open and close the work. The work also transforms itself over its 30 minutes of performance — the appearance of the figure of the scholar Vernier in Mvt II returns battered and defeated in Mvt. VI

But only rarely could these resonances be described as quotations; they are far too atomistic and aphoristic. Bartok, Messiaen, Berio are present as well, though in forms likely imperceivable. These are the stuff of historicity more than history, not the end of history but rather an awakening into its contradictory universality and haecceity. I was lucky enough to study with Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania; through his music, such a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous has become a core element of almost all my works, though since those years in Philadelphia the approach has shifted from abstract appropriation of technics to a search for aesthetic reconstitution to a subtler but less assured hope for a kind of redemptive catastrophism; the past is not past, nor does a creative engagement with it set limits — rather it opens opportunities, as the chain of musical-being transforms the present into the future.

Through this kind of hermeneutic agency, Benjamin's portent is found, and perhaps even resisted a little bit. For "The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious."

The work is dedicated to Yarn/Wire, and to George Crumb.