Delimitación conceptual del SQT (Burnout)

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Written in 1877, but not published until 1918, Pied Beauty talks of beauty (for which we might also read aesthetics) as being somehow not uniform, with words like dappled,

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brinded and freckled making an appearance. One of the purposes of the poem is to highlight God's grandeur (which Hopkins deems beyond human comprehension), but he also offers four adjectives as a way of detecting this, most specifically in all things that are "counter, original, spare, strange". These dense words inform not only my approach to the Chopin pieces that I experiment on, but the whole of Op. 48. Hopkins's poetry is naturally focused on perceiving divinity, and it is worth noting that both Christian and Jewish traditions have historically used four differing modes to unpack their texts. Lectio divina (in Armstrong 2007: 127) derives from the ancient church fathers and tackles text as literal, typological, moral or anagogical. By contrast, the Pardes of Jewish exegesis signifies plain meanings, deeper meanings, comparisons and secret meanings (see Cohen 1995: liv). That other disciplines have sought to provide modes for studying texts gave me courage to see that my exercises in music (however mechanically applied) might still be imbued with value.

Given the innate theatricality of my musics, I did consider employing Peter Brook's thoughts from The Empty Space (1968): his 'Gang of Four' is 'Deadly', 'Holy', 'Rough' and 'Immediate', although as these are more descriptions about how drama works on people rather than as ways of generating music, they are of limited direct application here. They certainly contain food for thought, but as a composer who designs music, I was concerned to develop a modus operandi focussed on the more gestative stage. Even here, we talk of 'working', rather than 'playing', moving music into being a laborious task, when it can be a joy-filled adventure of discovery. In this light, I explain the various modi ludendi emanating from the Manley Hopkins poem.

Counter

1) One pertinent dimension was provoked by William Blake (in Vaughan 1999: 64) who, for his wood-engravings, employed the opposite approach to the one normally used: rather like a photographic negative which is the opposite of what comes out, it is possible to make music that is an opposite of what it appears to be. This ability to show the opposite is elaborated in the background to Symbolist poetry. Mallarmé's idea (in Steiner 1989: 96) that a rose is expressible by a contrast with 'all that is not rose' is arguably unexceptionable, but it is daring for unleashing the potential in depicting the rose-ness of roses. The sense of absence we feel during a dominant preparation is about longing for the

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tonic that is not yet there, and extrapolating this non-presence is merely an extension of this principle. Sonically, though, we tend not to supply the missing notes from the pitch collections omitted by the use of chords. (I explore this in Synthony, which is a 'negative'

version of Mozart's 1788 G minor Symphony opening movement, which I detail later.) It should be said that 'complementarity' is an age-old principle (one thinks of the old depiction of Sonata-form with its masculine and feminine themes, for instance), and this form of contrast remains available. However, Schubert's recasting of Mozart's Minuet (from the same Symphony in G minor, noted above) in his own 5th symphony (1816)— which does use different notes, and thus could be said to be 'counter'—is more a mimicking of the gestures. Although it is artfully wrought, it does not run 'counter' to the tonality, melodic profile or spirit of the Mozart, and thus acts more as a re-expression of it.

Original

2) Harold Bloom's talk of mis-reading is a provocative one, noting that the form of the "parent-poem" is respected but is transformed by being utilised differently (1973: 14). It is relevant since musicians assume they are communicating things 'im-mediately' (i.e. with no friction or loss of message in the re-telling.) Although he sees text as more closed than others, mis-readings are a natural part of reading so a perfect 'Urtext' is elusive. The translational nature of all communication means that certain parts get missed out while others accrue. This is potent in creating a layering of texts, permitting a logically explicable transmorphing rather than a merely fanciful one. Equally, the word 'distortion' (used by Ligeti 1983: 59) need not have malignant associations, though it seems more applicable to short cells than the word 'transformation' which rather affects a whole. Colin Matthews notes (in his CD liner notes for Turnage's Three Screaming Popes of 1989) that Turnage initially wanted his music to mirror Bacon's transmogrification of Velázquez though, frustratingly, he mentions no specific details.

Spare

3) Machery's view is that texts have an inbuilt ability to reveal themselves (1978: 79- 80). Following Althusser's contention that Marx read Adam Smith "symptomatically" (1969: 28) it is possible to map two views onto the same words on the page and see how

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they fit together. In particular, divergent views provoke thought, and I have enjoyed observing how Bach's text responds to analysis. This can result in sieving words, taking them out of their initial context, and doing a sort of surgery on texts, making their component parts work in a variety of ways. Dividing up texts and seeing what is relevant and related is an important part of a musician's performance discipline, so composers too can slice music different ways to see what it is made of.

Strange

4) In Derrida's notion of supplement, texts become subject to an invasion to their apparent integrity, though I believe the injection of foreign material need not be supplanting as Derrida suggests (1997: 144-5). Different from mis-reading, it invites additional perspectives and outside material to be part of the conversation. It is a way of being open to the alien and the element from outside which can be enormously powerful to the invention in classical music. A good example is how a dissonant note's injection (e.g. the opening of Mozart's Quartet, K. 428) has an ever controlling presence in the way the story goes. Rosen (1976: 120) calls this the "latent energy" in the material (in relation to Haydn), and while this is not so unexpected if one approaches music with an organic mindset, the idea of a bacterium or virus infecting the music from outside has potential.

The four MH words (Manley Hopkins) can be seen to map onto mathematical operations:

Manley Hopkins description arithmetical procedure

Counter goes against what is there: subtraction Original grows from the material using itself: multiplication Spare sifts and separates what is already there: division Strange introduces a foreign element: addition

Quite how these come alive is explored in this document, and the Afterword suggests that these 'new' procedures actually have a history. For reasons explained below, I began my Bach-experiments by refracting some Chopin piano music through these lenses. I

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subsequently discovered that Manley Hopkins was born on 28 July, the day that Bach died: in a down-to-earth sense this is insignificant, irrelevant or meaningless but a mythopoeic point of view allows this sort of resonance, and asks how pied or dappled Bach’s music is.