Today I’m struggling with a piece that should have taken an afternoon to write down. It appeared in the mist when summoned, almost on cue and apparently fully-formed, but it has taken another few months to grasp once more the geometry of its form, the ratios and rationality of its quixotic light and shade. The piece is a gift-cum-commission for Edward Higginbottom, at the end of his long tenure at New College, Oxford. It’s a short setting of George Herbert’s Love bade me welcome for unaccompanied choir, and from the moment I started working on it, it was clear in my mind that this piece existed – complete, perfect, and (to me at least) unutterably beautiful and heart-rending.
A murmur, a hue, a shadow, an outline, a pang (what C.S. Lewis might well term ‘Desire’) – these are the beginnings of creativity that I’m aware of: but then I’m generally not aware of the real genesis of a piece of music, only sometimes; often they’re as impenetrable as forgotten dreams. When I do know I’m thinking about a (new) piece, I sometimes feel sure that I’m seeing or feeling it rather than hearing it. It—whatever it is—is amodal or multimodal, an Ur-expression of some deeper confluence of ideas or tangling of neurons.
In fact I did write down the outline of Love bade me welcome in an afternoon but in the weeks since I have struggled to agree with myself on its final form (I’ve been seriously tempted to produce a folk-rock version). It’s the writing that both destroys and captures the original idea in pinning it to the manuscript: much of the struggle has been to reconcile what I consider the aesthetic perfection of the original apparition, itself the ghostly flesh on the exquisitely-proportioned skeleton of Herbert’s poem, with the necessity of making it sing-able while avoiding the safe danger of quantizing its chaotic edges down to an excessively crystalline beauty.
The fourteenth-century theorist (and I feel a connection with the fourteenth-century state of musical affairs – the groping after new modes of expression and new combinations of shape and colour as openly described by Machaut in his quasi-autobiographical Le Voir Dit) Johannes de Muris talks about shape on the one hand and sound on the other, and by ‘shape’ he means notation: ‘no musical relation exists between shape and shape, but musical harmony is created by the relation between the sounds. For it is not the shape that is diminished or increased by another shape, but the sound which is signified by the shape.’ But the shape of notation is an attempt to capture and convey the shape of musical sound – a kind of translation, and therefore the available shapes in notation, of which there are many but not infinitely many, inevitably reduce the initial mental conception to an essentially digital and coarse-grained reproduction.
Barlines and time signatures become the bars of a prison containing originally free ideas awaiting their controlled exit into the hands or larynx of official executors. I often find, and particularly in this piece, that I don’t want to have to prescribe a specific barring system, as the music has a much more fluid, overlapping set of pulses which the performer can tap into. But on the plus side, today I made a discovery about the structure of those beats which I could not have determined without the forced labour of (twenty-first century) notation: a pair of double-digit numbers to do with the circumstances of the commission—which I had vaguely considered appropriate as acceptable extra-musical impositions—suddenly turned up without asking in what I currently perceive as the best rendering of my original vision. How does that happen? Is the original inspiration causally affected by my subsequent work on it? Have I influenced history, rather than the other way round?
Talking of influencing history, I’m also concerned with another spectre—that of much greater but more nebulous proportions—the ‘meta-work’ that my work will put on and never take off. I mean that cloud of influences, references, juxtapositions that lie in wait for my intellectual baby and which—once engendered—like your online history— cannot be revised, rewritten. The life of the work over which I now slave so assiduously will have a shape free from its creator’s legal reach: I cannot say how it will be interpreted and received, however hard I try. I can, however, attempt to map that penumbra of the meta-work, and possibly to influence and leverage its course through the musical ocean... but that’s another narrative for another time.
Antony Pitts
01/02/2014
[first appeared in
Music and Shape. / Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel; Prior, Helen.
New York : Oxford University Press, 2018]