Radio Program in commemoration of György Ligeti’s 80th birthday (2003)
Prologue
Poēme symphonique.
Footprints in the water, planes full of hoes, the footprints aren’t there anymore. Words carry over the waves, clocks strike the night hours, birds fasten themselves into the darkness. The shadows are destroyed, destroyed like the tapping of the clockmakers sunk into hundreds of years.
*
Transylvania rising in the distance, where chestnuts fall straight from the trees down like porcupines – the branches of the trees chew holes into one another and the forests stop echoes. Wonderful and wonderfully preserved German towns of the Middle Ages with their Hungarian and Romanian names: unique villages, which one doesn’t see anywhere anymore. In the middle of the mountain paths to nowhere, the twists of sudden ideas plunge the fermatas over the valleys: the views are clear, and the induction of the intellect in this part is the same as holy men and buffalos have: still spread out in all conceivable ways. In the depths of the river live fish, which bite the ducks from under the surface of the water. The southern Carpathians and Nicolae Ceausescu-built useless and wonderful serpentine road, which surpass the mountain peaks 2000 meters high, evaporating streams of air to the birds for the start. The sky frozen over from the heat, clouds boiled over stone masses – like milk.
A billygoat. A village chapel. A train
*
Squares with corner-sharp sides, people like points on their edges – trails of paths, which flutter curiously between the cliffs, with more and more brown tones – starting from here all is together, starting from here voices quiver between the tips of the mountains, like damp hair – henceforth the birdfeathers’, window shutters’, and teapots’ rattle, henceforth each individual part of you in constant motion. What holds souls in the hands of poverty for drying up on their highlands, is that here is enough for hiding somewhere – and here is the most room for looking inside.
A jack snipe. Soldiers: “Hey hooooooooooo, stop!”.
The whispering of the radios, dark crackling past the light-blue ether – ether which liquifies it more, the further it passes into the light of dawn. The walls on the road, and in the destination of the perception – a thing, which it expresses, is anyway defective, or incomplete, and a picture of completeness can only arise in the mind of the listener. Though the invisible conception, this nonexistent and powerful reservoir – all levels interweave into one, consciously and unconsciously, decomposing hierarchiesand heavenly bodies already trying to cool down. The escape is human: it is one voice from being on the other side, from a world put in order, though it sounds contradictive: it is a spiritual coming home – declared as a crackling current from somewhere else.
Lontano.
*
Part I – Lontano (from a distance)
quite long
…The whole room was filled with a thin stringy, extremely complicated web, becoming identical to the secretion of silkworms, who before their pupation are knitting full of the whole inside of the box. Inside the web yet other beings in addition to you, moths and beetles, who wanted to reach some kind of illuminated room of a flickering candle, big, damply foul pillows, whose rotting stuffing illuminates out of the ripped-apart pillow covers. Every movement of the tangled tissue, living beings led to vibrations, which take over the whole system, so much that the heavy pillows swing here and there just as ceaselessly and start the whole web flowing. From time to time the movements intensify each other so strongly, that in some places the web tears and a part of the beetles unexpectedly becomes free, so soon after that in the transmission’s suffocating hum they get lost once again in the vibrating braid. Those suddenly-performed events here and there change the structure of the whole web little by little, which intertwines more and more: in some place unraveling knots develop, in other gaps open up, where some bundles of of beginning braids float around like frost-covered threads. The changes in the system are irreversible: not one state can occur again. Something inexplainably sad – the cooling fusion of the oozing time and a changeless past.
Music.
An unrecognizable scheme of the prophecy, a distant echo of something, which has yet to arrive, and the acknowledgement of which, whether in itself, demands true mastery.
Eight-legged semaphores, their sudden movements over and under, uniform system of straight lines, endless possibilities of formation – and for the benefit of a single traveller to ignore all the traffic lights leading the way, if he wants to find something valuable.
Big collections always behave unsuspectingly, a system hatches out of chaos only on the basis of incomprehensible hints – and their coagulation into stabil buildings means a huge group of unseen processes. The walls of the buildings – that have arisen for the landscapes – are rough, and could at any moment fly up, jump into the air and rattle their right angles, fling itself behind the skyline , splaying all the obstacles they meet into two groups.
*
Music. An ascent.
Sinking wagons, wagons sinking under the ground. Like the landscape had opened up from inside and the inner parts torn out – trees converge their tops into a bundle and the birds in flocks, and the trains that have changed their direction begin with a slow pleasure to go into the depths of the earth, towards thosethings disappearing down below, in some grandly stiff pride. One can see them until the horison, huge trains, small trains, short half-pint locamotives – the horison is flaming red and the rails are twisting themselves into a cluster one on top of another, keys change darker and darker, the shadows of the trains stretched out long drawing themselves past the land ever closer to the mouths of deepness. Short contractions. When the wagon has finally disappeared, a tender flickering remains on the land, as if from heat.
Music – all the way to a final peace.
*
Everything that had been done throughout the centuries, detached – changed five long note shapes into beads, into glass beads for games – beads, whose cores were crushed into tiny black hearts. On the arched gateways of Europe’s alleys people are whispering speculation about racial belonging, tanks entering into the cities drive over all available, imperatively prophesizing the general religion of fire, and a few hundred kilometres farther composers designing numerological tables, heads bent – tables, which become a growing maze, closing more and more in itself, until the tension inside them swells up, and their content forms into crystal. The edges of the tables hiss from the inside by the incoming influence of power from the rhythmic thrusts, small, big and unnoticeable impulses, quiet, strong, punctuated and unpunctuated trifles, through a part of them hop over the edge of the paper and tumble naughtily on the floor.
[Boulez – a segment from afar]
Let’s say that it’s the year 1961. The core of the tables is forming into a diamond – underneath its giant pressure.
*
Intermezzo I – Four surfaces
Lux aeterna.
In the thin air, the dampness collected here during the night evaporates, and its remnants drop silently onto the ground. Birds secretly come here into hiding for the night, birds who are invisible the whole time, a weak hissing under their wings: a tender voice of ice, (...but only when you press your ear against their wings stretched out)… The birds glide past the layers of the atmosphere slowly, stopping in metre and in timbre without rhythm, and just like trains: you see them as far as the eye can see.
In those hours opens a passage, above, in the macro-landscapes – a passage, which has the squirrel’s tale – opens higher, to the surface of lightlessness – where all the activity on the earth is able to be followed like through a glass screen: all borders finely drawn out.
A vocal satellite picture – a satellite picture, all the characteristics and colours have fallen to sleep – and asleep till the trains sunk under the ground.
A long, easy ascent.
Before sunrise, during the segue disappearance of birds, a delicate streak from their tails stays in the layers of air: a collection of tiny points – which hangs as rain on the ground – rain, whose individual drops are not in the slightest way isolated, but transform into one filmy field standing up.
*
Part II – Proportional Changes
Atmospheres. A grouse. The first culmination, an expansion.
But, in those places, where the tanks had driven in, they brought a death blow to the rhythm in any case, because people, who had lived there so long among the impulses, the accented and unaccented, the synkopized as well as the unsynkopized, were suddenly burdened with thoughts of staying alive, that in the middle of a bigger thought to find an appetite to dance (dancing, which is the foundation of all sorts of rhythms). For this reason composers before all others are connected by the body movements, silent gestures, and motions past space and time of the people around them and who before everything was amazed at Bartok, after the wars didn't manage once to capture this freshness of impulses, this rough power, which blew across Europe before the war as a stiff wind. Some inactivity arises from one sound’s state of being to another, a plasma, which sinks past the empty corridors of an outcast house further down in the wound from floor to floor.
The second ascent. A helicopter. A grouse. Dialogue I.
And for that reason exactly, change may be born here in the region. But this change isn’t so musical, (its vocal parameters are only for its outer features) as it is a movement in the space above and sweeping back – back so far that it is almost back to a time when there was no life on earth at all yet. Above, in order to see the tables’ maze of numbers through the glass screen: a similar, big mass behaving in a way that is incalculable beforehand, full of thousands of imperceptible choices and details – back, in order to recognise the pulses of time as the pulling of big breaths, pulling themselves out more and more from the metre filling up. To capture all passages from one layer to another: whether above, or back, is difficult, though imaginable.
The third ascent. A helicopter. A grouse. Dialogue I.
Each change presupposes objectives, though it is sure, that the direction will change. Each change of perspective presupposes phantasy, though little of it remains: with words it is not possible to express what change needs – one must study wordless association. Each change needs tools in order to cross established borders, though more or less it is sure that trains disappear out from under you. After the change everything can be exactly the same, just different.
The summit of the culmination, all backgrounds. A sudden vanishing. Peace.
“Long” becomes wide, “Wide” becomes narrow, and in Tallinn the Short Leg pulls itself in one night to the area of Wide street and Long street breaks up into lizards in front of the Swedish embassy. A column of arcades directed into the distance grows, which melts deeper into the background, and the last columns (before their customary turns left and right)… whistle with a piercing voice.
[a jacksnipe changed beyond recognition]
From the harbour – the Ideal Country starts.
*
Intermezzo II – Ideal Country
Aventures. Sea.
Interludes of rocks between the water, sudden whirling stops, a lightening-quick alternation of black and green tones in the ripples of the waves. An irregularity of surfaces, long expanses, the illogic nature of the water: inlets opening inwards, inlets opening outwards, smells discharged from glimmering continents, 180-degree turns, niches and grooves of the sea. Distant voices, plentiful mirrors, a moving coridor of fog behind the vertical atmosphere.
Streets spread out on the waters, the gathering of people at the intersections, speaking a language which no one up till now has understood – group of picnickers sit on the waves, and pick flickering bird’s eye primroses on the top of the sea. Big puddles spread out on the sidewalks.
A journey outside: streets straightening out in the distance into y shapes, puppies bark like creased paper. On some of the houses’ windows, and insides the earthenware pots, some dried ferns.
*
Part III – Turning Back
Defective Volumina, LP with sudden cracking. An billygoat filtering into the highs.
The city ends, the landscape begins. The street, gravel the width of the road. Opposite the high weeds, willows, burdocks, dug-up shoulders, frozen marigolds. The furrows of the fields right next to the city, a small field, again weeds, a ditch, water on top, a small world thrown into confusion, then a broad landscape.
Time carries further, as a flow of small ideas, in any case. The objects showing in the distance clear up, their contours become precise, and their chain of pasing goes through space like an unrestrained electric current.
Clear, straight, concrete forms, endless right angles, pyramids, rectangles, a fewsparse green shoots, the feathers’ airdance on houses illuminatedin the dark, fires going out – echoes against fire, echoes like sails, crossroads and circular surfaces in-between, and sparkling ices that stopped against the sky.
*
At the same time nations run down from the mountains as an indistinct mass, becoming bilingual on the valleys, and again upon reaching the bottom – multilingual. Horses stroll faithfully close behind their masters, the backs of mankinds are twisted from poverty, though they continue on the road down, in the direction of a dampness growing ever more, they turn onto a side path – and upon reaching a clearing, there a lonely grass-snake howls gloomily to them.
A dog howls in a thrice-repeating canon. A short fade-out.
[57’20”]
Jüri Reinvere © 2003
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