Fail Worse; Fail Better.

Ivan Hewett on the Music of Richard Barrett

Author(s): Ivan Hewett and Richard Barrett
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 135, No. 1813, (Mar., 1994), pp. 148-151
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1002901
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Richard Barrett infocus
FAIL WORSE;FAIL
Ivan Hewett dons sackcloth and ashes before
mong the many deadly ideas germinatedby romanticismis
the notion that underneaththe socially constitutedself - the
self that needs language, custom, tradition - there is an essential
self, a self that needs none of these things. Such a self needs a dif-
ferent kind of art, an art that communicatesby arousing a kind of
resonancein the onlookeror listener.
What prevents most of us from resonatingfreely is our accumu-
lated culturalbaggage. Previously this inheritedculturalframework
had been taken as defining a essence; now it was held to be a kind
of dead weight that obscured and stifled that essence. Art could
help throw off that dead weight, but only if it abandonedoutmoded
ideas like taste, balance, and the idea that the arts- including music
- were languagesto be learnedlike any other.
Beethoven encapsulatedthis idea in his inscriptionfor the Missa
solemnis; 'from the heart, may it go to the heart'. Listening to
Beethoven's mass was a not a matterof decipheringsymbols. Lan-
guage was too gross and clumsy a medium for the experience
Beethoven intended, which was rather a mysterious and instanta-
neous communionor empathybetween two souls.
It is an anti-intellectualview of art;for what role could the intel-
lect possibly play in this 'empathy'? The intellect needs language,
and language dulls the luminous, primal colours of the world.
Things lose their sensuous essence and disappearbehind a grey con-
cept which does duty for them.
Richard Barrettis the last person we expect to espouse an anti-
intellectualview of art. His music comes with such a fearsome rep-
utation for complexity, both in the auraleffect and the means used
to achieve it. But his view of the way art works is essentially the
same as Beethoven's:
To makemusicoutof disembodied abstractionsmightbe a veryinter-
estingexercise for a composer to indulge in, but why shouldanyone
wantto listento it? Whathas it got to say to them?Whathas it in
common,if you like,withthelistenerthatis goingto be productive of
some kindof empathy- I hesitateto say 'communication', because
thenwe beginto get intolinguistics,andthat'sa hugegreyareaas far
as music is concerned...I thinkthe importantthing for me in that
respectis thatmusicsuchas this,whichI supposeis 'visionary','con-
fessional'andall thosethings,hasa function,whichis to be productive
of whatwe mightcallillumination of varioussortsin a listener.1
Empathy, illumination - these are warm words, suggestive of a
life-affirming experience. So is Barretta latter-daymystic, a John
148 The Musical
BETTER
the music of Richard Barrett
Tavener in modernist disguise? There are certain things in his
music which do suggest a seeker aftermysteriousessences. He talks
about 'working with the grain of the sound' of a particularinstru-
ment, the 'grain' being that part of the instrument'ssound that lies
beyond, or beneath, received ideas of a 'good sound', beyond any
idea of instrumentalidiom.
This reminds us of Stockhausen's search for the inner life of a
sound. In his case the idea springs from a cosmic pantheismwhich
is certainly life-affirming. But the briefest acquaintancewith Bar-
rett's music soon dispels any notion that affirmationis his goal. It
presents a bafflingly intricate surface, made-up fidgeting, buzzing,
hopping lines which pursue their microtonalflutteringsin apparent
ignorance of each other. It's a texture we cannot read as a whole.
The partsremainstubbornlyseparate,both vertically and horizontal-
ly. In the short term it sounds frenzied. In the long term, the effect
flattens into an overall desultoriness,punctuatedby mysterious,and
apparentlyunmotivated,silences and violent outbursts.We become
aware of an uncomfortablediscrepancybetween 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 summonup for it - tepid and intermittent.
Turning for help - as so often in contemporarymusic - to the
composer's written statements on the music, we find some com-
fort - for we discover that the notion of defeat is written into its
very structure. This is how Barrett describes his string quartet, I
open and close:
The identityof the workis essentiallyconcernedwith processesof
entropicdisintegration,obsessivecirclingaroundan obscurefixed
point,gradually
encroaching chaosandfailure.
distortion,
Failure is one of Barrett'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
Enlightenmentfrom which they rebelled - shared the belief that if
you stripped the self of all its social accretions, you would arrive
at an unfetteredcore of free human nature. Beckett put this idea to
the test, and found only a void: the 'I', or 'Not I' he describes in
his early trilogy of novels:
Do theybelieveI believeit is I who am speaking?That'stheirstoo.
To makeme believeI havean ego all my own,andcanspeakof it, as
Times March 1994

A DETAILFROMRICHARDBARRETT'SPRINCIPIA? UMP ANDREPRODUCED
theyof theirs.Anothertrapto snapmeupamongtheliving. It'showto
fall intoit thattheycan'thaveexplainedto mesufficiently...
Barrett, 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 describe things. In Beckett 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 portrayedin the work is mingled with
a strangeexhilarationat the perfectionof the language. The portray-
al of failure gains added poignancy throughthe aesthetic success of
the means used to portrayit.
In music this distinction is not available, so Barrett's approach
has to be, 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 Barrett'sassertion
that the first version of his Illuminer le temps 'totally failed to do
what I was intendingto do when I wrote it'?
The answer is that we can't. The very idea of approachinghis
pieces as works of art is thrown into doubt. But the music is baf-
fling in other ways. It exerts itself mightily to achieve somethingit
doesn't believe in: the arrival at unmediated 'essence', free of
human, social encubrances such as style, idiom and language. A
self-confessed nihilist, Barrettknows that all that lies at the end of
the searchis the Void - somethingwhich most mystics have discov-
ered, but whereas they could equate the void with God, for Barrettit
simply is a void. The goal of the music is banished, so all that
March 1994 The Musical
BY PERMISSION
remains is the restless search for it. The search itself takes on an
absolute quality, a quality of permanentunreachability. To ensure
this he has to make sure the other kind of self doesn't re-emerge;the
one that comes into being throughlanguage, custom, style.
Barrett'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 anti-intellectualismof 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 to
attend to, what's central and what's peripheral. Get rid of the
notion of salience, and you also get rid of anotheressential compo-
nent of mental life, this time to do with communication. This is
the fact of sharedknowledge among a community of speakers. It is
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 be spelt out.
This is pedantry with a vengeance; and some dim notion of the
horror of that state is conveyed by the extraordinarypedantry of
Barrett'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(perhapsthe only one he could possibly admit to) that
absolutely nothing be taken for granted,including the 'pre-existent
complexity' in music:
Times 149
 [the]complexityof sound-event or gestureis in factpresentin all per-
formedmusic,howeverit is notated,andevenwhetherit is notatedor
not. The difference,perhaps,betweena musicwhichis notatedin a
complexwayandonewhichisn't,is thatone'sattitudetowardsthethat
pre-existentcomplexityin theperforming meanscaneitherbe brushed
asidein the interestsof producinga viablesimplificationfor a given
situation,oronecanattemptto graspholdof it andworkwithit as part
of therawmaterial.2
We sense here an itch for total control, combined with a hint that
composers who simply welcome the 'pre-existent complexity' in
music, and allow it to flourish on its own terms, are a bit lazy.
Lazy, 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
thoughtof from scratchevery time, virtuallyguaranteesfailure.
Barretthas a fine contempt for all things bourgeois, and aiming
for 'success' is a quintessentialfeature of the bourgeois mentality.
But his own aesthetic of 'failure' is not just anti-bourgeois, it
negates the idea of any communitywhatever.It sets its face against
a kind of knowing that arises out of shared practice and assump-
tions. Insteadit creates a kind of musical discoursewhich embodies
the sense of alienation, a discourse in which nothing, from the
largest span to the smallest gesture,has any connectionwith 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 purchasehere.
In short,the listener is humiliated. But if this is true of the listen-
er, how much more true it is of the performers,who have to embark
on a kind of via dolorosa before they arejudged fit to play this kind
of music. Barrettexplains why:
One of the reasonsfor suchnotationaltendencies,as I see it, is the
necessityto takeseriouslytheevaporation of agreednon-notated inter-
pretationalpractices- for example the distortion of metrein anypiece
headedwiththewords'waltztempo',thehistorically changingconcen-
sus on whichpitchcomesfirstin a trill,thefunctionof vibrato,andso
on. A composition hasto encapsulate, as faras it can- andof courseit
mustultimatelyfail in thistask- its owninterpretational contextif per-
formersarenotto approach it withworn-outandinappropriate interpre-
tationalstrategies.3
But if performance practice conventions have 'evaporated', as
Barrettclaims, surely there's no need to guard against them? We
can't help suspecting that any ideas about interpretationthe 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 correspondingrage for absolute control. Bar-
rett seems to feel that, if he relaxes his guard even for a moment,
history, in the guise of inheritedways 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
utterlypowerless, like one of Beckett's characters.
Even skill is suspect; Barretthas said that one of the aims of his
notation is to capturethe kind of 'wrong' sounds made by amateur
150 The Musical
players. Certainlythe results of the player's attemptto realise the
notationwill be to some extent unpredictable,but that doesn't imply
any freedom of manoeuvre on the part of the performer. Unpre-
dictabilityand freedom don't always go hand-in-hand. If I stumble
while walking up a flight of stairs it doesn't imply I'm exercising
my right to stumble;I simply made a mistake. A mistake is a kind
of momentarynegation of our powers; it is embarrassingbecause
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 certainly true of a performerof Barrett's
music - and you humiliate him, and rob him of his sense of free-
dom. But the sense of freedom is fundamentalto being a knowing,
willing subject. It's precisely that kind of self (a self with some
genuine content) that Barrett's nihilism denies, the self which his
performersmust, for the durationof 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. In fact
Barrett's music cancels the musical object as efficiently as it can-
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 School have in common). And this is bound to be so,
given Barrett's hostility to the knowing subject. It is the belief in
a relatively fixed, stable world of objects which gives substance
to our subjectivity. It gives us something to relate to. Take away
the 'thinginess' of the world - and that is Barrett's avowed aim -
and subjectivity disappearswith it.
What then is left when subject and object have disappearedinto
the void? Only the desperateattemptto reconstitutethem through
'process', a process that mimics, in sound, what psychologists,
physiologists, semioticians, mathematicians - a whole gallery of
eminences blanches - tell us about them 'from the outside' - as
observedfacts.
This confers a kind of objectivity on Barrett's music, but a very
strange one. It's not the objectivity of neo-classicism. Neo-clas-
sicism's objectivity springs from the self-conscious way it manip-
ulates signs, whose meanings, though slippery and debatable, are
at least 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. Its 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 nause'e:
A littlewhileago,just as I was comingintomy room,I stoppedshort
becauseI felt in myhanda coldobjectwhichheldmyattentionthrough
a sortof personality.I openedmy hand,looked;I wassimplyholding
the door-knob.This morningin the library,whenthe 'Self-Taught
Man'cameto saygoodmorningto me,it tookmetensecondsto recog-
nise him. I saw an unknownface,barelya face. Thentherewas his
handlike a fatwhitewormin my ownhand,I droppedit almostimme-
diatelyandthearmfell backflabbily.4
Note the locution 'the arm fell back' - not 'he let his arm fall'.
Door-knobsand humanbeings are here turnedinto objects of a spe-
Times March 1994
cial kind. They become - underthe 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 Barrett'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. It can be explained
because the music's strangenessdoes not in any way imply chaos
at the level of structure. On the contrary,all the events in a Barrett
piece can be explained by reference to process or structure,often
of a very sophisticated kind that involves stochastic processes,
Markovchains and so on. But this isn't an explanationof them for
us as listening, feeling, thinkingsubjects any more than saying that
our feelings and thoughts are 'secretions in the brain' explains our
thoughts and feelings. But this is the only kind of explanationthat
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
Barrettis very interestedin. But it is only the mechanics of memo-
ry, its formal properties,that interest him, not its felt existence for
the humansubject:
I'm particularlyinterestedin the idea of an exponentialprocess of var-
ious kinds, because the way in which an exponential rate of process
will increaseits rate of change as it is changing seems to me axiomat-
ic to the way memory works when the mind is assimilatingmusic.5
Notice the way memory is referred to the mind, rather than the
knowing subject whose mind and memory it is. But this is to be
UNITED MUSIC PUBLISHERS
RICHARDBARRETT:recent works
negatives (chamberensemble - 9 players)
First performances:1992-93 by Elision, Australia
knospend-gespaltener (soloclarinetin C)
First performance:London, September1993
Andrew Sparling,clarinet
In progress: vanity (symphonyorchestra)
Commissioned by the RexFoundation.
Firstperformance:January1995,BBCS.O.
Scores availablefor sale or inspection in our
showroom, open Monday-Friday. Composer
leaflets andfurther informationfrom the Promotion
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UNITED MUSIC PUBLISHERS LTD
42 RIVINGTON STREET LONDON EC2A 3BN
Tel 071-729 4700 Fax 071-739 6549
March 1994 The Musical
expected, given that 'I' is now 'Not-I'. Having banished subjectiv-
ity, Barrett 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
their 'axiomatic patterns'. Barrettis not a complete nihilist. He
still has a touching faith that science can irradiate things with
meaning. But science can only explain, not give meaningto things.
His mentor Beckett never made that mistake. He never visited
the ultimate humiliation on his characters of turning them into
objects. They still 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 remnantof subjectivityremains in Barrett's
music, which is alienatedand objectifiedthroughand through. The
only appropriatereactionto such music - the only thing an attempt
at empathy might produce - is indifference. By its very nature,
Barrett'smusic destroysour incentive for listening to it. It simulta-
neously creates and mirrors our indifference towards it. This is
failureof a kind;but not, I suspect, the one the composerintended.
I
Notes
1. Interviewwith RichardToop in Contact,no. 32 (Spring 1988), p. 32. 2.
Interviewwith RichardToop in SoundsAustralian,Autumn 1991, p. 30. 3.
Interview with RichardBarrettin Resonance, a London Musicians Collec-
tive supplement. 4. Jean-PaulSartre:The diary of AntoineRoquentin,trans-
lated from the French La nausee by Robert Alexander (London, 1949), p.
11. 5. Interviewwith RichardToop in Contact,no. 32 (Spring 1988), p. 32
r I 'k.
Gottingen
Handel Festival
June 10-13, 1994
Handel and the Duke of Chandos
* Opera "GIUSTINO" HWV37
* 1st version
"ESTHER", (Hamanand Mordechai)HWV
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* "ACISAND GALATEA"HWV49a
* Chandos Anthems
* Chamber
concerts, harprecital,etc.
FreiburgerBarockorchester,ConductorNicholasMcGegan
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- EnsembleLe Stagione,Conductor:MichaelSchneider-
Soloists:JulianaGondek,DorotheaRdschmann,Jennifer
Lane,BarbaraSchlick,MichaelChance, DrewMinter,
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McGegan(harpsichord),The Classic Buskers,etc.
Programmedetails,bookingformsetc. from
Gottinger Hindel-Gesellschaft,
Hainholzweg 3-5, D-37085 Gottingen, Germany
Tel. 01049-551-56700
Fax 01049-551-45395
Times 151