The Sorabji Archive — Articles — Finding one’s way through an immense building of music (4/4)

Reinier van Houdt and René van Peer: Finding one’s way through an immense building of music (4/4)

The work

Studying the manuscript first of all involved making the writing legible and achieving a result that will be understandable for hands and eyes during the performance. This was often the work I did in the morning. The manuscript in its original form is often barely legible. It does show a surprising consistency — no striking through, no corrections, no sketches. It is evident that Sorabji was in a great hurry to record the complex concepts and structures that sprang up in his mind quite spontaneously, anxious that they might swiftly evaporate like a dream just after awakening. As I see it, the handwriting corresponds with the pace at which his ideas arose. Scribbling away frantically he could keep track of his creative output in detail, and monitor the larger structures. All notes were written as slanting dashes. Most of his them are very difficult to identify, and often you can’t immediately determine the exact pitch from them.

Consequently I have had to decipher much of the score through deduction, by getting to know all facets of the composition (themes, overall structure, figuration and idiosyncracies), and frequently going back in the text to solve remaining questions and uncertainties. In the end I had converted all dashes into dots. If necessary I rewrote entire pages to render them legible and performable, for instance where Sorabji distributed the notes over five staves, or in places where the location of the notes on different staves clearly does not correspond with their distribution in time.

There was not always a strict separation between working on the manuscript and playing the music through. Rewriting was often the result of explorations of the melodic trails; but also of calculation. Sorabji has in some places taken Chopin’s organic patterns of uneven clusters of notes against a smaller, even, thematic grouping to the level of procedure — extensive layering and autonomy in conjunction call for notes not to be played simultaneously, in chords or in a fixed meter, but at very short intervals after each other; ar as Sorabji himself said, “… it is necessary to maintain a steady smooth extra-metrical prose like flow. The whole must be as an elaborate fabric wherein all the threads of warp and woof are plainly perceptible although each contributing to the substance of the weft of tone.” Still, rehearsing this composition is not inherently different from working on other music, except for its intensity and scale.

I started working on the piece in the middle, the relatively transparent second movement. I did not yet have the stomach to enter the jungle that is the beginning of the composition, with its tangle of themes and bizarre harmonies. That would have been too demanding — I had only just begun deciphering the manuscript, and needed to enter Sorabji’s world gradually and get acclimatized to it, to be able to get a grasp of what was written on those pages. In the first movement the music seems to grow unchecked, into a tangled chaos. By comparison the second movement where chaos and exuberance have been arranged in smaller units that act as vistas. After a Chorale Prelude, a Toccata Intermezzo and an ominous Ostinato the movement unfolds to a theme and forty-nine variations, in which the theme is processed and observed almost as if in a scientific experiment — inverted and mirrored, going forward and backward at the same time, expanded, collapsed, in endless rows of fractal redoubling, in regrouped fragments. Disentangled from the jungle of the first movement, these variations present sensuous melodic lines, brilliant contrasts, and the entire gamut of colours. Negotiating my way through the composition felt like trying to get to know the entrances, rooms, floors, and all the connecting corridors, gateways and stairs of a vast and complex building, of which the walls are covered in dazzling patterns — like in a mosque or a Hindu temple. At first I couldn’t see the walls for the decoration, and kept walking into them. In time I started to discern the larger structures.

After the work I did in the morning, I mostly used the afternoon for rehearsing and internalizing the music at the piano. This brought technical and psychological problems of its own — making the complex structures evident, controlling exceedingly long lines, being able to play up to four concurrent musical layers in a way that would sound natural. I needed to develop a conscious broad and differentiated touch, in order to achieve the stratification and spaciousness in the music. And for realizing the four layers I had to sharpen my imagination to achieve a certain independence from my motor system. It was a slow and time-consuming process that felt like growing new brain cells at such sessions.

After deciding how to tackle a certain passage on a technical level, I would spend much time observing the sounds and the body moving in performance as if these were played back at reduced speed, to go with the flow of the music. As soon as I would notice that the music came off the page and acquired a life of its own, my hands seemed to lose all weight, and the sound became lighter, too. I find these things hard to grasp in words. Playing music on the piano is more than just typing, more than pushing keys, it’s not an act that you can repeat mechanically. You can’t step into the same river twice, as Heraclitus said. You will have to go with the moment, otherwise you’ll stumble and fall.

It is very much like meditation. You have to work a great deal to achieve a state of mind in which you can watch the body very closely, and at the same time go with the flow of the music and step back to keep an eye on the larger structures. The size and complexity of the composition make it virtually impossible to keep an overview of the totality. So you’ll have to be with the moment, and have faith in the acquired skills of mind and memory — which make performing it come very close to improvisation, as if going through it for the first time. Which is an amazing experience, having worked with this music so intensely for four years.

[This article was originally published in Musicworks Magazine, in 2004. Further information can be found at the Musicworks Magazine website or contact the authors via e-mail, Reinier van Houdt: houdt.r.van@12move.nl, René van Peer: r.vanpeer@wxs.nl.]