Fail Worse; Fail Better. Ivan Hewett on the Music of Richard Barrett Ivan Hewett; Richard Barrett The Musical Times, Vol. 135, No. 1813. (Mar., 1994), pp. 148-151. Stable URL htp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=( 127-4666% 28 199403%29135%3A1813%3C148%3AF WEBIH% ‘The Musical Times is currently published by Musical Times Publications Ltd. Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www jstor.org/journalsmtpl him, ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Fei Jun 30 18:39:06 2006HUI Richard Barrett in focus FAIL WORSE; FAIL BETTER Ivan Hewett dons sackcloth and ashes before the musi Az: the any ely dss gine by roma the nto that underneath te socially consid sl =the de that ones langutgecasom,tadon~ tere is an ested fea elf tha ees none ofthese things. Suh sel wets a i- feat kind of us an a ha commuricnes by aoising kindof tronics he cloker orien ‘Wn prevents moat fu rom ening Celi our acum led cura baggage. Previously this inked ela ranework tad been taken dering aesence now it was hel oe a Kind of dead weight hat obscured and ifled tat execs. Art cold help how off that ead weigh, but nl it abandoned ontmoded iets ke ast, lane, andthe data the as inddng music wet languaes tobe lame ike ary oer Beethoven eneapouated ths idea in his iectpton forthe Misa solemn; tom the Neat, may 80 the Rea Listening Beethoven's mas was ano a mater of deciphering eymbol, La vag was too gost and clumsy « medi forthe experience Beshove ined, vhich was ruer a mysterious and instante eons comin or nay betwee 9 so itisanannellecua ew of at for what rol could he intl lc posi ply in is ‘empay"? The nelle ees language, tod lnngugs dolls the laminous, primal colour ofthe worl Ting lotr senso evened apes nd ry cone cept which des dy fr them, Tchad Bare is th Ist son we expt fo ep tat intelectual view ofa Hi mae comes wth sha feome o> ttn for complet, both nthe al fle nd the means ed to achieve i But his view ofthe way at works i eset he same s Beethoven's To make music out of disembodied abstractions might be avery iter cetingexerite fora composer 1a indulge i, bu why should anyone tas it got to say wo them? What has itn common if yu ike, with the listener tats going to be peductive of some Kind of empathy I hesitate to say ‘communication’, because then we begin get int linguistics and tha’ a huge grey area as far ‘8 music is concerned, want to Hsten 10 ie? Wh think the important thing for me in tha respect is that music soc a his, which I suppose is “vison, “eo fessional’ and ll thos things, has function, which i to he product of what we might cll lumination of various sorts in listener! Empathy, illumination ~ these are warm words, suggestive of a life-affirming experience. So is Barrett a latter-day mystic, @ John of Richard Barrett ‘Tavener in modernist disguise? There are certain things in his, music which do suggest a seeker after mysterious essences, He talks about ‘working withthe grain of the sound” of a particular intr ment, the ‘grain’ being that part ofthe instrument's sound that lies ‘beyond, oF beneath, received ideas of a "good sound’, beyond any idea of instrumental idiom, ‘This reminds us of Stockhausen’s search for the inner life of a sound. In his case the idea springs from a cosmic pantheista which is certainly life-affirming. But the briefest acquaintance with Bar- reit's music soon dispels any notion that affirmation is his goal. It presents a bailingly intricate surface, made-up fidgeting, buzzing, hopping lines which pursue their microtonal flutterings in apparent ignorance of each other. It's a texture we cannot read as a whole, The parts remain stubborly separate both vertically and horizontal~ Iy. In the short term it sounds frenzied. In the long term, the effect ‘attens into an overall desultoriness, punctuated by mysterious, and apparently unmotivated, silences and violent outbursts, We become ware of an uncomfortable discrepancy between the objective Facts ‘of the musical texture ~ the evidence of huge mental and physical effort that went its composition and performance ~ and the interest we can summon up for it~ tepid and intermittent. “Turning for help ~ as so often in contemporary music ~ to the ‘composer's written statements on the music, we Find some com fort ~ for we discover thatthe notion of defeat is writen into its very structure, This is how Barrett describes his string quartet, ‘pen and close ‘The identity ofthe work is essentially concerned with processes of enttopic disintegration, obsessive circling around an obscure fixed pit, grodually encroaching distortion, chas and fare Failure is one of Barret’s favourite themes, as it was for his mentor Samuel Beckett, Indeed it's become one of the master themes of modernism, and marks the melancholy nemesis of the romantic idea of the essential self, The romantics ~ and the Enlightenment from which they rebelled ~ shared the belief that if {You stripped the self of al its social accretions, you would arrive at an unfettered core of free human nature. Beckett put this idea 10 the test, and found only a void: the ‘I’, or “Not I" he describes in his early trilogy of novels: Do they belive I belive i is I who am speaking? That's theirs too To make me believe Thavean ego all my own, and can speak of asArt ro Rico Banner's Pscrs © OND No HswaoCcE BY ANESION they ofthis. Another tap to seap me up among the living. 1s how to fall jt chat they can't have explained to me sufficiently. Baret, in his music, tries to create or evoke a similar kind of ‘minimal self, But there's an essential difference in his approach, dictated by the inability of music to deseribe things. In Becket the ‘obsession with failure is offset by success ~ not to say triumph — at the level of expression, So often in Beckett our dismay and distress at the appalling vision of life portrayed in the work is mingled with 8 strange exhilaration at the perfection ofthe language. The portray a of failure gains added poignancy through the aesthetic success of the means used to portray it In music this distinction is not available, so Barret’ approach has tobe, in a sense, more literal. The failure, emptiness and sense ‘of encroaching oblivion has to be enacted, rather than described. ‘And this immediately raises an acute problem, for without this dis tinction, how can we judge which failures are intentional (and so are in fact successes) and those which are unintentional (and therefore really are failures)? How can we make sense of Barret’ assertion that the first version of his Mluminer le temps “oally failed to do what Iwas intending to do when L wrote i? ‘The answer is that we can't. The very idea of approaching his pieces as works of artis thrown into doubt, But the musi is baf- fling in other ways. I exert itself mightily to achieve something it ‘doesn't believe in: the arrival at unmediated ‘essence’, free of human, social encubrances such as style idiom and language. self-confessed niilist, Barrett knows that all that lies at the end of the search i the Void ~ something which most mystics ave discov- ‘ered, but whereas they could equate the void with God, for Barret it simply is a void. ‘The goal of the music is banished, so all that remains isthe restless search for it, The search itself takes on an absolute quality, a quality of permanent unreachability. To ensure this he has to make sure the orker kind of self doesn't re-emenge; the ‘one that comes into being through language, custom, style Barret's entire project is essentially a negative one. It is not a case of asserting his view of things, is more a case of denying our own. This he achieves by disabling and humiliating all those human faculties and powers that create the sense of a socially, constituted self. ‘This explains the ant-inellecualism of the music. Any kind of thought about the world requires some notion of salience ~ the notion that some things matter more than others. Barrett's hyper complex textures destroy this sense. We don’t know what 10 attend to, what’s central and what's peripheral. Get rid of the notion of salience, and you also get rid of another essential compo- ‘ent of mental life, this time to do with communication. This is the fact of shared knowledge among a community of speakers. tis this that allows us to take certain things as read. Without this even the simplest statement could, theoretically, take for ever, because all the background right back to the beginning of the universe ‘would have to e spelt out. ‘This is pedantry with a vengeance; and some dim notion of the horror of that slate is conveyed by the extraordinary pedantry of Barret’s music (revealed in small ways as well as large. In bar 4 of the string quartet, I open and close, there’s a Bottom G in the first, violin. It is marked ‘open string’ and ‘fourth string’; but, where else could it possibly be played”). It is an article of faith ‘with Barrett (perhaps the only one he could possibly admit to) that, absolutely nothing be taken for granted, including the ‘pre-existet, complexity’ in musi: March 1998 "The Musical Times 149)[te] complexity of sound-vent or gesture is in fat present inal pee formed music, however i is nouted, and even whether it is noated or ‘ot. The difereae, perhaps, between & music which is notated in a complex way’and one which isnt, that one's atin toward the that pre-existeat complexity in the performing means can ether be beushed side inthe interests of producing Viable simplification for given slustion, or one ean stempt to grasp hold of it and work wih its part ofthe raw material? ‘We sense here an itch for total contol, combined witha hint that ‘composers who simply weleome the “pre-existent complexity’ in ‘music, and allow it to flourish on its own terms, are a bit lazy. Lary, and a touch vulgar, because their over-riding aim is to pro- duce a ‘viable simplification’. In other words, they take certain things as read, so that something can be achieved successfully, in contrast to Barrett's method, which, by insisting that music be thought of from scratch every time, virtually guarantees failure. Barrett has a fine contempt forall things bourgeois, and aiming for ‘success" is a quintessential feature of the bourgeois mentality But his own aesthetic of ‘failure’ is not just anti-bourgeois, i negates the idea of any community whatever, It sets its face against 1 kind of knowing that arises out of shared practice and assump- tions. Instead it creates a kind of musical discourse which embodies the sense of alienation, @ discourse in which nothing, from the largest span to the smallest gesture, as any connection with music’s past. Memory, desire, anticipation — all those things which confer meaning of a specifically human kind on music ~ are repudiated, ‘They can get no purchase her. In short, the listener is humiliated. But if this i true of the listen- er, how much more true it is of the performers, who have to embark (on a kind of via dolorasa before they are judged fit to play this kind ‘of music, Baret explains why: (One ofthe reasons fr such notational tendencies, a Ise it isthe necessity 1 take seriously the evaporation of agreed non-nolatd ater pretation practices ~ for example the distortion of met in any piece headed wth the words “wat tempo, the istrially changing concen- ‘ison which pitch comes fit in til the fnction of vibrato, and 50 ‘on. A composition has to encapsulate, a far ast can and of course it is own interectational context if pet= Formers arent to approach it with worn-out and inappropriate inerre- tational strategies ‘ms ltimately fin this task But if performance practice conventions have ‘evaporated’, as Barrett claims, surely there's no need to guard against them? We can’t help suspecting that any ideas about interpretation the per- former might have would be "worn-out and inappropriate’, simply because they haven't been chosen by the composer, What lies behind these sentiments, it seems to me, is a fear of contamination, and once again ~ a corresponding rage for absolute control. Bar= rett seems to feel that, if he relaxes his guard even for @ moment, history, inthe guise of inherited ways of doing things, will reassert itself, So the performer, as well as the listener, must be stripped bare, deprived of everything he thought he possessed, rendered uterly powerless, like one of Becket’s characters Even skil is suspect; Barret has said that one ofthe aims of his notation isto capture the kind of “wrong” sounds made by amateur players. Certainly the results of the player's altempt to realise the notation willbe to some extent unpredictable, but that doesn't imply ‘any freedom of manoeuvre on the part of the performer. Unpre lictabilty and freedom don’t always go hand-in-hand. If 1 stumble While walking up a fight of stairs it doesn’t imply I'm exercising my sight to stumble; I simply made a mistake. A mistake isa kind ‘of momentary negation of our powers: itis embarassing because we feel at once responsible for it and powerless to prevent it. Put Somebody in a position where his every move will involve a mistake at Some level ~ which is cerainly true of a performer of Barret's music ~ and you humiliate him, and rob him of his sense of fee dom. But the sense of freedom is fundamental to being a knowing, willing subject, It's precisely that kind of self (a self with some ‘genuine content) that Barret’s nihilism denies, the self which his performers must, forthe duration of his pieces, abandon The performer ~ and listener ~ become, in essence, objects. ‘Their subjectivity is cancelled out. But without the subjectivity of the listener the musical object falls into doubt as well Bartet’s music cancels the musical object as efficiently as it ca cels the knowing subject; inevitably so, because the one needs and defines the other. Barrett has declared a preference for process as opposed to product (this is something all the New Complexity Schoo! have in common). And this is hound to be so, given Baretts hostility to the knowing subject. It isthe belief in relatively fixed, stable world of objects which gives substance to our subjectivity, It gives us something to relate to, Take away the “thinginess” ofthe world ~ and that is Barret’s avowed aim — and subjectivity disappears with it. ‘What then is left when subject and object have disappeared into the void? Only the desperate attempt to reconstitute them through ‘process’, process that mimics, in sound, what psychologists, physiologists, semioticians, mathematicians ~ a whole gallery of ‘eminences blanches ~ tll us about them “from the outside’ ~ as ‘observed fats This confers kind of objectivity on Barrett's music, but avery ‘strange one. 1's not the objectivity of neo-classcism. Neo-clas- Sicism’s objectivity springs fom the self-conscious way it manip- Lulates signs, whose meanings, though slippery and debatable, are atleast publically available, Whereas Barrett's music denies any attempt to read it as a language, and attempts to become an ‘object’ in quite a different way, the way of alienation. Is status as an object is bound up with its unintelligibility in human terms, Divorced from any connection with human purposes it comes to appear strange and alien, like the famous door-handle in Sartre's La nausée In fact AN ile white ag, jst as Las coming into my oom, I sopped short ‘ecase Iflt in my hand cold object which eld my attention hough | sor of personality. Topened my hand, looked: I was simpy balding the doorknob, This morning in the library, when the "Slf-Taught Man’ came to say good morning to me itook me ten seconds o recog rise him, saw an unknown face, barely a face. Then tere was his hand lke fat write worm in my own hand, dropped it almost ime: itly andthe am fll back bbily [Note the locution ‘the arm fell back’ ~ not “he let his arm fal’ Door-knobs and human beings are bere turned into objects of a spe- March 1998cial kind, They become - under the gaze of the minimal, essential self the self with no content ~ monstrous, strange, unknowable, It is this kind of unknowability that's expressed (if that’s the word) by Barret’s music. Only one kind of knowing can get a purchase on it: the scientific, alienated one. We can explain this ‘music. What we can't do is make sense of it. Tt can be explained ‘because the music's strangeness does notin any way imply chaos atthe level of structure. On the contrary all the evens in a Barrett piece can be explained by reference to process or structure, often ‘of a very sophisticated kind that involves stochastic processes, “Markov ebains and so on, But this isn't an explanation of them for us as listening, feeling, thinking subjects any more than saying that ‘our feelings and thoughts are ‘secretions inthe brain’ explains our thoughts and feelings. Bur this is the only kind of explanation that Barrett's music admits. It uses objective processes to constitute itself as an unreadable, alien object. Some of those processes may bear familiar, human, names. One such is memory, something Barrett is very interested in, But itis only the mechanics of memo- +, is formal properties, that interest him, not its fet existence for the human subject Pm paseusly intrested inthe ide of an exponential proves of vat- ious kinds, because the way in which an exponential rte of process ‘will increase i rate of change a iis changing seems to me axiomat ie the way memory works when the mind is assimilating musieS Notice the way memory is refered to the mind, rather than the ‘knowing subject whose mind and memory it is, But this is o be UMP RICHARD BARRETT: recent works negatives (chamber ensemble -9 players) First performances: 1992-93 by Elision, Australia knospend-gespaltener (solo clarinet in C) First performance: London, September 1993 ‘Andrew Sparling, clarinet In progress: vanity (symphony orchestra) ‘Commissioned by the Rex Foundation First performance: January 1995, BBC S.O. ‘Scores available forsale or inspection in our showroom, open Monday-Friday. Composer Leaflets and further information from the Promotion. Department. UNITED MUSIC PUBLISHERS LTD 42 RIVINGTON STREET LONDON EC2A 3BN Tel 071-729 4700 Fax 071-739 6549 ‘expected, given that Tis now ‘NotI, Having banished subjectiv- ity, Barret is left only with the empty husk of it. Disembodied memories, minds, things which have now lost all meaning, but Which may, like specimens under a microscope, be analysed for theie ‘axiomatic patterns". Barrett is not a complete nihilist. He still has a touching faith that science can irradiate things with meaning. But science can only explain 90 give meaning to things His mentor Beckett never made that mistake. He never visited the ultimate humiliation on his characters of turning them into objects. They stil remain subjects, with some remnant ~ just ~ of recognisable humanity. That is why we, the audience, can be ‘moved by their predicament, and by the author's compassionate expression of it. No remnant of subjectivity remains in Barret’s ‘music, which is alienated and objecttied through and through. ‘The ‘only appropriate reaction to such music ~ the ony thing an attempe at empathy might produce ~ is indifference. By its very nature, Barrett's music destroys our incentive for listening to it. Tt simulta neously creates and mirrors our indifference towards it. This is, failure ofa kind: but not, suspect, the one the composer intended. Notes 1. Inerview with Richard Toop i Contact, o, 32 (Spring 1988), p. 32.2. Interview with Richard Toop in Sounds Australian, Autumn 1991, p30. 3 Intersiow with Richi Barat in Resonance, a London Musicians Colles tive supplement. 4 Jean-Paul Sar: The dary of Antoine Roguentn, ns lated from the French Za nausée by Robert Alexander (London, 1989), p LL Interview with Richard Toop in Contac, no. 32 (Spring 1988), p32 ee Géttingen Handel Festival June 10-13, 1994 Handel and the Duke of Chandos * Opera “GIUSTINO” HWY 37 * TESTHERY, 1st version (Haman and Mordechai) HW 50a, + ACIS AND GALATEA” HWW 490 * Chandos Anthems * Chamoer concers, harp rectal, ete Frebrger Barockorchester, Conductor Nicholas McGegan "Cantamus Chor Halle/Saale Ensemble Nuove tiusiehe = Ensemble Le Slagone, Canductor.Wichael Schneider ~ Soloists Juliana Gendex. Dorathea Roschmann, Jennifer Lane, Barbara Schick Michael Chance, Drew Miter Michael Dean Rulus Muller, Ralf Popken, Michae! Schopper, Ancrew Lawrence King (harp, Nicholas MeGogan (harpsichord), The Classic Buskers te Programme dela, baoking forms ele. rom ‘Gatinger Hindel-Granacat Hainnolzweg 3-5, D-37085 Gottingen, Germany ‘Tel 01049-851-56700, Fax 01089-551-48305