Radio Program (second part) in commemoration of György Ligeti’s 80th birthday (2003)
“I imagine with a strong affect, very complex music, branching off labyrinth-like, with audible melody forms, but without various “back to something” gestures, not tonal, though not atonal either. I don’t have a name for the celebration of this composition, and I am not looking for any name. That which revolves in my mind, is a strongly concentrated form of art that has been given a soul. I try, outside of various modernity, to live out something of our contemporary feelings of life once again in music.“
Doorbell overture (Le Grand Macabre). Fém (Etudes).
Part IV – Labyrinth
A micro-survey on a macro-landscape: – a sea-blue twilight reflect telephone posts, drawings on both sides – toilets shoving straight in Europe’s eastern countries, dead motors all over the road, the silver lines of gyms, tentacles of odourless telephone pole which wreath into the deepness of internal continent. Diary pages describe nonexistent days, ruined computers in radio stations, where an automatic announcer reads out symphonic lists of names in front of and behind of the piano piece with an unshakable ceaselessness – and the wrong time, each moment some of the computers establishes the year as 1985 and wishes everyone a Happy New Year in the middle of the empty 7 th floor!
*
A single seismograph registers an almost nonexistent vibration from a submarine, who helps out a sigh of death in a depth of kilometers. In the darkness of the waters drops of air and remnants of broken radio signals jostle around, rulers measuring the surface of the road, fish escaping from the scene of the event. The situation changes with each moment: the entirety decomposes into ingredients, into piecemeal exceptions, the air turned useless is flung to the ground and details sink as sediment into the bottom of the sea, forming whole offices turned upside down. A maze of small details in long lines, small parts of stories past the unseizable whole– a part of those are small words, a part devoid of content, like all sorts of words. Rules have neither their own meaning nor does one single part sink into the place envisioned for it, but on the grounds of an accidentalemission – differently from a musical time, who demands only a shore in both ends for itself, and at the same time is makinga whole list of rules for the whole road.
The lobster quadrille (Madrigals).
A small forgotten lake on the densly colonised island, between secret underground gold mines, which underwater surveys in the Northern Seaare done for. A serene and countryside-idyllic silence, the tail of the sun touches the ground, and licks with its tongue across the earth: – its tongue is doing that, like always, adverbial in object case.
Waves filtered from high above.
And late at night lakes rise up to flight, filtering gently as smoke into the atmosphere and – making it easier, the higher they have reached into the sky. The tops of the trees attempt to them a little, though their branches are powerless: – only scratches developing on the edges. The middle parts of the waters rising faster than the edges – forming bedsheet ghosts for the landscapes, like those in summer camps, where school children are sent. The gentle murmur of the lakes on their flight, the ignoring of the earth’s gravitation, with bluer and bluer tones, and a jelly-like smoothing-out in the destination where water spreads out past the cosmic surface, and under the ground a single plaice is still swimming around.
Automne a Varsovie (Etudes).
Differently from people, plaices don’t ponder what has past and what is coming. The rootlessness of aplace, its openness from time and space, and although firmly standing in one as well as another – it composes its surroundings for itself freely. From time to time there is a need arising for a new plaice – fleeting moments, because a moment is temporary, and before you can greet your own thoughts, one can shove that longed-for place into a pot and boil it – in addition his tail stays between the pot and the lid …and shakes playfully.
Anfang. Fire.
Dug-up ground of the surface of the Sun, flames flashing out like earthworms biting their own gardeners, noses angrily plugging up; ants gnawing the walls of the space ships to nothing; the fixing screws of the telescopes, whose with a slow grace turn themselves around frequently; the lakes detached from the earth’s gravitation fly on the surface of the Sun and stay overnight in its deepest valleys, snoring and mumbling to itself. At the same time frogs father under the song arches of Tallinn and perform the song “Our Bathtub Next to the Pond” in a joint choir – the rustling of thousands of brakes on the surrounding highways.
Flying Robert (Madrigals). L'escalier du diable (Etudes).
From the Sun to the Gray Earth: water drops, a few puddles like there was water in the bathroom, airy moss, where small creatures live. A rough, uneven surface, dirty particles fly inside the upper layer of slime, which the small creaturesare stuck to travelling from one column to another. The small creatures sing, gathering in scheduled places for this purpose.
A great ascent.
The anthills of the satellites around the Sun, cooled metal and wordless confusion. Collections of submarines roving about in the depths of the Sun, as ones darkened from a light unusual for them up till now. Penguins sleeping on the noses of the ships, as long as those currents of flames rush further into two waves. Emperor-like trajectories and steadfast sureness of the direction: the submarines here have plenty of chances to cut, neither the depths nor unexpected reefs hinder them. The Sun spits out in a slow, but steady pulling open and shut, the fourth degrees of Hungarian plurals' quantities into the cosmos, which at one time later smooth out the drops of water on the Earth, until the drops evaporate and ferns grow in their place; the submarines shake in rocking vibrations and the penguins hop into the sea of fire, and chatteringly look in the fire for one another.
Coloana infinita (Etudes).
A macro-lanscape on micro surveys change details into a field, tiny details all over – all of the words which I am reciting here are filled with tiny spaces between words, with the maximum degrees of Fennougrian plurals’ quantities, the ferns have grown its roots into the interior of sounds and become warped proudly drooping down over the horison. Sentences like rails in the direction of the sunset. Green, scented, Bruckner-like lines over the sky – at that moment as I reach the middle part of the sentence, I have already crossed tens of horisons and tens of ferns, and the further I go from the first word, the greener the landscape becomes, which shows that my story changes ever more botanic-like – though the blame isn’t with the sentence structure, but the plants, which grow inside the phonems. Despite this, the fourth-degree-quantities cross many obstacles on their flights towards the ends of the sentences: the rustling of book pages, who argue that they do not exist and who anyway flip themselves solely in the hands of the quantities’ breath; accents of foreign languages; tens of conjunctives, who attempt to trip up the quantities and make them stumble; vain predicates and objects’ dash-lipped sense of duty, by which objects in large numbers walk clumsily around and in an overall state of suspension wave their hands: no idea where they should go or what they should say there. When the plurals’ quantities are there of the chain reaction’s foundation, and not those of the singular, then they have run into a bundle also with an alteration of diftongs, changing vocals into a whining paste. To the end of the sentence, just a second before the period – there, where a feather of a fern’s sheaves is leaning – a forest massif of phonems is pushed together: this energy brought here from the Sun, and piles up on top of the period, smashing the last consciousnessless.
Enigma.
When one looks down in the direction of the micro-level from the macro-level, then one can notice a slight, almost detailed movement going counterclockwise from the wheels of time – phonems hanging on the rugged sides of words jutting out, just as if they were trying to resist the huge wind of senseless words, which puts its wheels turning.
Ascent to the top.
*
Intermezzo III – Crystalisation
Reet announces, disorder. Finnish ash grove caves. Filters.
Entangled platinum edge of the North Pole, full of pipe ends thrown there from underwater catastrophs and echoes of computers in the air. Dishes falling on the ice, the seals with tattoes, peering frightened out of the holes. The thud of your steps thousands of kilometers away in seismographic readings.
The alphabet (Madrigals).
Imaginations, reflections in the atmosphere. The howling of pipes, instruments inventing themselves, Conlon Nancarrow’s mechanical piano in a dance between ice banks, Indonesian gamelan music in your clothes, Alam-Sahara Banda Kinda tribal music, Buganda xylophone music, the whisper of thoughts on walls of ice, not one of them having a louder voice.
Books becoming fluid in a small piece of ice, Boris Vian’s novels, edges wet, the pages flap about in the grip of the wind and spits little drops on the underwater graves – the fractal geometry of fibres of ice – the repros of Picasso, Cezanne and Escher, washed off the graves – winding staircases up to the sky, on the top steps of which seals lounging around, and look at one another after precise breaks, like clockwork.
Emptiness from border to border: open, level and similar, gray and white, brown and yellow stripes, blue. In some place elevation, in some a bed of ice without water, freedom, behind the buzzing walls a chapter flashes, which that time was left unlearned, and which is born again as a dream. The echo of distant dream savannas, faces in photos which were lost in concentration camps, coridors.
Question marks in the air, answers, which one don’t know, suppressed shame, a silence of the plains of air, a glass-like surface above, in which single dark shadows glide – and on the horison there an upright wall of rain.
Touches bloquēes, Arc-en-ciel, Cordes a vide (Etudes).
*
The wind rummaging through the upper layers of ice with brooms, polishing them off into crystal – a kind of numbness, exactness, but anyway a kind of numbness, very dreadful; the continuing of history. The Sun deep in thought, moving black spots on its surface, the swirling of places to dive, – the circling of planets in the broadcast of a sucking murmur past the atmosphere, a flock of birds speeding up close behind.
The changed light on the way home, if going home at an unaccustomed time. A concert of flocks in the early morning of the yard, the slants of the chunks of ice swinging left and right. An unshakable sense of peace with oneself.
An ascent, an abating, a new ascent.
*
The birds cut the train stations in half – the last breath of the platforms; the wrong time, winding back, the clocks turn themselves back an hour earlier....and everything starts over from the beginning. The quietness of the train stations, the crumbling walls. People in waiting. Rails going nowhere. The birds departing from the sun’s inhalation, the expanding rings in the sky. The gathering of birds into flocks, the fern flowers raining slowly down. The flocks tighten, find a form, made up of wedges – and nosedive to a train station, flying straight inside from the arcades and smash the buildings built on the onetime top of the sea into grains of sand.
All backgrounds.
*
The crystalization, the huge tidying-up by the brooms of history, a migration of nations in the dampness, finding and losing their identities like the repeating refrain of a song; – - ladies done up in make-up, with a slyly hidden bottle in the hem pockets and a poodle at the end of a rope, – snowy poodle, which has smeared itself a doodle to its best – a snowy poodle, who carries his caboodle, and the strudel she ate for dessert has already become a noodle, which lazily sings a song to the poodle, in which they boiled him a strudel – and a doodle of a noodle.
A long gap.
*
The flight of 275-ton rocks over Venice tenderly starts the whole surface of the water to shake. The buzz of a single motorboat becoming more distant, the light pulls narrow stripes to the wrinkles of the water, the voice of the waves rustles against the epicarp of the stones; the rocks in the sky lazily brush the the church steeples, calling their tin roofs – rocks stop, sway left and right, then over and under, starting the entanglement of a flow of the rocks arriving next also behind the horison. The bundle grows and becomes a mess, its movements are infectious for individual parts of the contents as rumours, for a long time that cloud whirls around like a giant wheel of the world, discovering the newly imperceptible heights of the city – then the rocks are set again in motion, beginning to push each other from the bottom to the top – thrusting, until rock waves appear from the bottom to the top. Water stops and cream-coloured fish rise to the surface, telephone posts begin vividly to smell; the tables of the cafés jump impatiently in place, like their hour had arrived, a part of them are soaked in the channel already; only the scurrying sterns like cats behind the buildings can be seen from the boats. The surge of the rocks quiets down gradually, a part of the bricks form some reverse balconies, crisp curls form pedestals, the heads pointed downwards. – When you look upside down, then you must remember, that you will have look at what is happening as the real world down, near the legs.
*
Part V – Destination
Car-horn overture (Le Grand Macabre). Cuckoo in the pear-tree (Madrigals).
There’s not a more agreeable form than the one of a small detail; to give an impression on some single note not as something spicy, but as the whole sap of life; a conflict of images, to analyse them; a portrait of the surroundings, not going deeply into it; a thought without propagandising and a mood without any weights, and finally the perspective background behind the visible activity, a symbolic deepness. It is an oratorium in a second. (parodying Fr. Tuglas)
En suspens (Etudes).
The micro-structures of the ice bergs, accents inter-tangled: soot particles, the leg of a mosquito; domed drops of air turning into strings of pearls, which together stretch millions of kilometers. Fine hissing cracks in the wall of glass; rifts, tears, matter broken up in small pieces and unbroken, rubbing against each other and rubbing the almost unnoticed energy of outer-space. That is the energy in the detail.
A long, sad tale (Madrigals).
*
A gust of agreements, the state of quieting oneself – power and known pureness, or if not always pureness, then – let’s say, inexhaustible curiosity.
Galamb boron (Etudes).
Ringing.
Only on the edges is a macro-surface the same as what a micro-landscape is. Like in each case of a horison, the goal is always an agreement of counter-poles, just the proportions are different, the small have big characteristics, the big small ones.
*
Silence.
*
The birds land onto the endless surface. The ice melts into their silence, in the sky the edges come together, and let the atmosphere go as a sound of the night.
Bach, Partita in Es: Prelude.
*
Epilogue
Lux aeterna. Poeme symphonique.
Little scrunching monthly gym cards of Transylvania, like the entrance passes of the inquisitors, which never show their invisible side to the sun. The rooms of childhood that have grown quiet, in the closet a skeleton chuckles, having there fun: reading jokes. The intersection right below the window. At the end of one street some distant vision glimmers, incomprehensible beyond recognition, between the cream-coloured mug of thorns sticking up.
The tops of lanterns on the streets in the dampness like in a geometry textbook, the monotone falsity of cement, over the flat asphalt the wet entangled curls of the clouds, the light without shadows, the shadows of darkness. Blue colours in the feather brush of the painter, darker and darker, in-between the light, the round eyes of the cars and the unbalanced creak of the tyres in the unsuspecting gusts of wind.
Tunnels on the left, tunnels on the right, steps and platforms: in the depths of the earth roar trains, on the earth and in the open-air markets vans, which are never re-registered or resold – dusty, smelly and pushy, but like a moment of useless repentance people pass by, well-dressed and well-fragranted, just like the detailed decorations in Bach’s Adagios, without confrontations.
The creation of a composer is more than his biography. Though this creation is based on a very real base – it is still in the area of that biography.
In addition one shouldn’t forget: attention also, a research-like absorption and fantasy belong to the biography.
[56’40”]
May-June 2003
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