Composed during the earliest phase of the second Palestinian intifada, my Passage Work begins with a cataclysmic tutti (soprano voice, seven instruments, tape). This echoes the opening of the finale
of my Oboe Concerto (1993-4), composed shortly after my return from
the Middle East where I had first-hand experience of the first intifada.
The first movement of the Concerto is echoed here in the falling and rising
arpeggios which originally characterised the oboist’s "passage work". In the
classical/romantic concerto this term denotes a mere occasion of virtuosic
display, but here such "display" forms an intrinsic part of the musical argument.
The process whereby details hitherto considered trivial are brought to the
foreground of our attention typifies the thought of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Towards the end of his life, Benjamin sought to encapsulate such an approach
to historiography in his unfinished Passagen-Werk, for which the English
is The Arcades Project (not Passage Work!), the arcades in
question being those of Paris.
The story of Benjamin’s Calvary has often been told: his flight from the Gestapo
across the Pyrenees bearing the Passagen-Werk manuscript in his briefcase,
his suicide (by poisoning) in the Spanish Catalan village of Portbou, in the
mistaken belief that he was to be returned by the authorities to Vichy France
(the death of Benjamin, coincidentally, is the basis for Brian Ferneyhough’s
first piece of music theatre).
In January 2000 I visited Portbou and was deeply moved by Israeli sculptor
Dani Karavan’s memorial to Benjamin, entitled Passages, the foundation
stone of which was laid in 1990, the fiftieth anniversary of his death. This
monument consists of some 85 steps descending steeply within rust-coloured
walls towards the sea, but stopping halfway at a sheet of glass "that may provide
assurance against falling without, however, alleviating the feeling of insecurity"
(Konrad Scheurmann in For Walter Benjamin, ed. Ingrid and Konrad Scheurmann,
Bonn 1993). Nearby is the cemetery where the local community has erected a
simple memorial to Benjamin. Both monuments bear inscriptions taken from Benjamin’s
own works. The former: "It is more difficult to honour the memory of the nameless
than that of the celebrated"; the latter: "There never exists a document of
culture that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism". Both of these
citations are used in my Passage Work’s text-collage.
After my Portbou visit I fetched up in the spectacularly beautiful French
Catalan town of Collioure. Being a fanatical visitor of cemeteries, I soon
found the grave of Antonio Machado, who had fled here from fascist Spain with
his family in 1939; worn-out and grief-stricken, he survived for only a month,
dying in the same room as his mother (who died three days later). I was familiar
with Machado’s work through settings by Dallapiccola and Nono, and was struck
with his use of the imagery of paths and steps and the strange link between
this and Karavan’s monument to Benjamin ("Caminantes, son tus huellas/el camino,
y nada más;/ caminante, no hay camino,/ …Sino estelas en la mar." [Traveller,
your footsteps/are the path, and nothing more;/ traveller, there is no path,/…only
tracks in the ocean]).
Alongside these texts (and a further excerpt from Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk:
"to identify the sea upon which we are voyaging, and the shore from which
we set out"), I chose a few fragments from other left-wing poet/exiles:
Pablo Neruda ("where the militant sea / dashes its blue waves beneath the
angry foam"), Paul Celan ("Where did the way lead when it led nowhere?"),
and Mahmoud Darwish ("Where should we go after the last frontier, /where
should the birds fly after the last sky?" – the last four words became
the title of a book by Edward Said, the most famous international spokesman
for the Palestinian cause). Whatever about the thematic links between all these
excerpts, there are those who will probably find their juxtaposition provocative;
I make no apology for this, but would nonetheless stress that a juxtaposition
is not an equation.
The text-collage forms the basis both for the solo soprano part, and, broken
into its phonetic constituents, for the vocal element of the tape part (which
uses the voices of Francesca Martelli and Andrew Redmond). The recorded sound
of footsteps, on iron and on asphalt, provides the remainder of the tape material,
which was initially notated like an instrumental score. Armed with a commission
from the Crash Ensemble, I started work on the piece in Collioure in November
2000 (I feel that the "ebb and flow" structure of the piece owes much to that
locality with its three small harbours in each of which the sea sounds quite
different) and finished it in nearby Céret the following March. The realisation
of the tape part was entrusted to the indispensable Jürgen Simpson. The première
took place in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre on December 20th 2001.
Passage Work bears the dedication … "das Gedächtnis der Namenlosen
su ehren" (to honour the memory of the nameless), quoting the Benjamin
inscription from Dani Karavan’s haunting memorial. Let me finish by quoting
Karavan himself: "I think it is very dangerous to work on such a subject because
you usually feel forced to do things very expressively – as a kind of loud
scream…I would never be able to work in such a way. I believe in the power
of stillness and a degree of reserve to awaken emotions. It’s impossible to
represent aggression by aggression. The artistic means would never be capable
of competing with the terrible reality…" (interview with Ingrid and Konrad
Scheurmann, loc cit.) Perhaps, unlike sculpture or architecture, and
with no thought of "competing", music may allow itself the occasional loud
scream; although the many strands of Passage Work do ultimately converge
on "the power of stillness and a degree of reserve", there are times when such
a scream is the only articulate response to the injustices of our world. 
|
