Matthew McDonald
Octopus Rehearsal
for the Arditti Quartet
“Think, if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways, that’s how the maps of the brain work by re-entry.” Gerald Edelman (via Oliver Sacks).
I was playing scales in my hotel room
with the tv on in a city
much like the city we’d left
that morning
when the news reported a storm
on a distant coastline.
Behind the presenter a great wave
was superimposed on the wall,
the wave
much like the wave I’d seen
in New York,
not on the Hudson, mind you,
but in the Met,
my eight arms
and their eight brains
aching from jetlag
and bad beds.
[No. Let’s start again.
We’re not together.]
The gardens were sublime.
Ferns. No music. Ferns.
If you’re ok with urban and size
is not on your checklist for beauty,
at lunchtime a pond
reflecting glass towers
is equal to Lake Geneva.
After the concert we dined on exquisite beef
from a farm where the cows
are treated to a daily performance
of Ligeti’s second string quartet—
largely micropolyphonic in nature,
which gives the meat a complex
granulated continuum that other meats lack.
[And?
Are you bored?
I am sometimes bored.
Pianissimo is such an unserious dynamic.]
It happened before—the same thing:
in one-two-one I lost you.
Like the time I declined a lift
and decided to walk off
the previous night’s wine,
asking the concierge for directions
but not listening to the answer
as all I wanted him to say was
Practise practise practise
for my instrument was with me
and the upbeat for a punchline
was as clear as a rhythmic sniff
or twitch of the shoulder
and my destination, the hall,
was an icon of musical excellence.
Just look at the artists’ photos in the green room
(the room is not green)
Brendel, Rubinstein, Berg—
all signed with high-baroque penmanship
with great affection and fond memories
and always a pleasure.
I walked on two arms
but backwards,
the map tangled in my suckers,
the inverted city bringing me
to the lobby again,
like Lachenmann notes that end
the way a beginning begins
but backwards,
as sound interrupted by hard silence.
As the soundcheck couldn’t wait
and my other six arms would worry
if I were late, I decided, finally, to take
a taxi to the hall.
All this in a time
before GPS navigation
and the attendant blue dot pointing
to where in the world my body is.
It may be worth mentioning at this point
the technique of reverse-direction taping,
pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer and his associates
of the musique concrete movement
and employed to stunning effect by the Beatles
on their 1966 track, I’m only sleeping,
in which George Harrison’s guitar solo is rendered backwards,
resulting in sounds I imagine
memory makes under pressure
but audible only
to certain deep-sea creatures.
It should also be noted that the sonic depiction
of the universe swirling back to its origins
like a glass smashed in reverse
is present, to this listener at least, in works
by Ligeti, Lutosławski and Georg Friedrich Haas.
[My life as an octopus
has been quite nice—
save for the mild dread of tennis
elbow and cancelled flights.]
I feel we’re losing tempo.
Am I rushing? Or are you dragging?
I know and I don’t know
you’re dragging.
But I know
and I don’t know
if three feel time in the same way
differently to one
the one might be wrong.
For this part of the rehearsal
I live in a wine barrel in Athens,
my lamp-light dull
in the Mediterranean sun.
Let’s go back a bit.
There are so many notes I want back.
Including these next ones.
Which are predators.
Spiny dogfish notes.
Hammerhead shark notes.
Notes that won’t speak under pressure.
Vast leaps like fishermen
pulling me up in a ceramic pot I’d called home,
the pot after which Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy was named,
also known as broken heart syndrome
for the way a broken heart resembles
the narrow neck and wide base form
of a Japanese octopus trap,
which is not so much a trap
as an illusion of safety with ropes attached.
My predators want my fingers.
I disguise my fingers as ink
into which I dip an arm
of Mongolian horsehair then paint
the air with thoughts from another mind.
Takotsubo ya
hakanaki yume o
natsu no tsuki
is what Bashō had to say
about octopus pots
in The Narrow Road to the Deep North
in a haiku preceded by the sentence
I stayed overnight in Akashi.
The poem translates more or less as
octopus pot—/fleeting dreams beneath/a summer moon
Translators are generally in agreement
on the first and third lines,
but it’s that modifier in the second line
where they really let their synonymic hair down.
Some go as far as using
the word evanescent,
perhaps to reach the right number of syllables,
perhaps to lengthen the brevity.
It’s a beautiful word,
as are the hundreds of words
within it, but takes forever
to say, negating, for me,
the brief nature of the dream.
Ephemeral is another candidate
in the temporal adjective stakes
but its origin in the Greek ephēmeros,
meaning lasting only a day,
puts the dream at risk of surviving
a full twenty-four hours,
which in dream time is an eternity
and certainly cause for concern.
One translator omits the dream altogether,
offering not so much a translation as
a wildly divergent interpretation,
with the octopuses exalting
in their ecstasy of a single night
under the summer moon.
Critics warn us off
anthropomorphizing the octopuses
and I’m inclined to agree, especially
since it’s only a pot Bashō refers to,
never stating whether or not an octopus
has actually crawled inside and made
a home in the cramped dark;
and besides, even if there had been
an octopus in the octopus pot
we have no idea if said pot is seen
underwater from the shore
at Akashi harbour
(an unlikely hypothesis given that it’s dark
and the moonlight’s glare prevents
much insight into water)
or midair, hoisted from the sea
to a boat by fishermen,
or even
abandoned among nets
and other maritime detritus
on a beach of tiny pebbles,
the octopus long gone,
or never even there
in the first place.
A more prosaic reading
is that Bashō sees the octopus pot
in the workshop of a master potter,
wet clay spinning on a wheel
while the Anagama kiln
glows and smokes in the yard.
But none of this solves the problem
of finding the right word for the dream.
How many translators wrote transitory
only to panic and say to themselves
just write brief. Brief is fine. It’s honestly
my favourite word that means brief.
In light of this there is
no small irony in the fact
that the Akashi Strait is home
to the second longest suspension bridge in the world,
so large it can be seen
from Osaka, Himeji, Kobe,
with no need to stay overnight in Akashi.
Translating emotion into sound means making a sound that the listener can translate into emotion. Emotion cannot be relied on to make sounds that evoke emotion. Too much emotion in a sound deprives the listener of their own response. In the physical making of sound there is only so much emotion sound can take. The sound breaks down. It shakes. Translating emotion into sound means telling the body that everything is ok, treating it like a child who walks in on their parents arguing, saying no no sweetheart, everything is ok, don’t tighten for this high note sweetheart everything is ok, just use natural weight sweetheart, don’t tense the small muscles in your hand for this shift (which has always had its issues but might just need some time away), let time heal its wounds, breathe, be aware of your breathing, but don’t think too hard about breathing sweetheart—you’re a great little breather! Do I seem upset? Sometimes it’s hard to tell laughter from yelling. This adrenaline would be better spent on a roller-coaster ride—am I right? A printed piece of music has its own geo-emotional map. The left page is all deck chairs on the Adriatic coast. On the right, the sharks are coming. I’m an inflatable unicorn in the path of a cruise ship. Only a page to find the way to get out of the way.
[I dragged my idea of sound
over oceans, also the no-ocean—
i.e. the land—
with all its edible torments.]
When striving for perfection some resort
to spreadsheets, marking their gains
like stocks in perishable goods,
as pyramid graphs of tomatoes.
At the top of the pyramid there’s a single red tomato,
cartoonish in its unobtainable tomato-ness,
a square of light on its plump equator
as in Munch’s Still Life
with Tomatoes, Leek and Casserole.
If the inferior tomatoes
are removed from the pyramid
the top tomato
falls to the bottom
and splats.
It is ruined.
Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit.
All Cows Eat Grass.
Every good tomato knows
it owes its success to the others.
In my latest performance-anxiety dream
I’m somewhere in Europe on stage,
no music,
the audience waiting,
my instrument sweating
out error in gridlock
in the back of a taxi
in Taipei.
[Something always happens.]
If the pyramid graph were inverted to place the most imperfect tomato at the top, a worthy placeholder would be the premiere of Ligeti’s Volumina for Organ in 1962. Anecdotes differ, but the gist of the story is that Ligeti, among other composers, was commissioned by Hans Otte, then director of the German broadcasting service ARD, to write a piece to be performed on the Sauer Organ at Bremen Cathedral. When the local media depicted the event as potentially sacrilegious, the Cathedral cancelled the concert. An organ in Gothenburg was found as an alternative, but things didn’t run smoothly there either. The piece begins with the organist laying both arms on every key before all the stops are pulled out simultaneously, a loud cluster disturbing the silence. The organ in Gothenburg, which had had a sewing needle installed to replace a missing fuse, couldn’t cope with Ligeti’s demands. As the motors whirred to life the organ began to burn, filling the hall with the smell of burning rubber and melting tin. The organist stopped playing as smoke rose from the pipes. Volumina was recorded in Stockholm two days later, with an edited recording played in the Konzerthalle Bremen. But the tape was not long enough and failed to record the end of the piece, during which a cluster is gradually released to a single note that is deprived of air as the motors are turned off.
*
In Ligeti’s version of the story, the Bremen concert had been cancelled due to news of the burning organ in Gothenburg, where another organist had rehearsed the piece. But Hans Otte claimed that the event of the burning organ took place after the cancellation in Bremen.
*
It wasn’t the radical clusters of Volumina that prompted the cancellation. And it wasn’t the fire. The church council were concerned about a specific detail in a piece by Hans Otte: dancing.
*
In the early sixties, Ligeti had been booked to give a 10-minute talk on contemporary music. He stood on stage in silence for 8 minutes until he was pushed from the lectern. Ligeti was funny like that.
*
In the film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in a moment of anguish, Captain Nemo plays Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on the organ in his underwater ship, the Nautilus.
*
Two arms are insufficient for a performance of Volumina. An assistant is required.
*
Davy Jones, condemned to ferry the dead aboard the ghost ship The Flying Dutchman in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, has an octopus-shaped head. In one scene he plays a coral-encrusted organ with his beard of octopus arms as he longs for his beloved, the goddess Calypso.
*
The Water Organ at Villa d’Este, Rome, uses water pressure to blow air through its 22 pipes. In the 16th century, it was destroyed by angry residents of a nearby village when the internal workings malfunctioned, producing one high, and highly irritating, continuous note.
*
There is very little documentation about the performance of Volumina that went well— the actual premiere, two days later, in Amsterdam, in the correct length, and no smell of burning.
[We tend to lose the flow.
It might be the intention.]
All together now:
A crick in my neck.
A twitch in my nerve.
A pain in the wrist.
An unwanted rest.
Currently reading
The Dialectics of Loneliness
but getting distracted
by anagrams of Adorno:
A rondo.
O Drano.
On road—a donor.
No road—an odor.
[I’m supposed to give you a signal.
This is the signal.
Our hips tilt towards unity.]
We’ve played this so often
half the notes are faded.
But none of us looks younger.
I’ve tried sport
but a car ran over my foot
while watching football
outside a café in Paris.
Yes—there were a few mishaps.
It was my fault
in four-four-four for instance.
But it will be fine tonight.
The diminished resonance
of harmonics in a full hall proves
that sound is a puppy, hungry
for attention.
It will lick their faces clean
of mean listening.
[I don’t know what happened there.
Probably on automatic.
Let’s try it softer.]
Listen.
I hear different notes emerging.
Like faces during haircuts.
Like Bach
from a submarine’s practice room.
Once while listening to Xenakis
on a jetty in Sweden
I confused the drone of an approaching boat
with a note from a tuned-down cello.
For a moment there was harmony,
or the implication of harmony,
more violent than the music,
Xenakis’s wild creatures tamed
and forced to concede to the undemocratic laws
of a fixed tonal centre.
The boat passed,
its drone bending low comment
on the upper strings’ glissandi.
It was raining on the next island
but we were dry as museums,
which are generally quite dry
except for the so-called spirit collections,
or wet libraries,
one of which famously contains
Darwin’s octopus in a jar,
preserved so well it can be taken
out of its jar and touched.
It is flexible to the touch.
[Are you happy?
I’m happy.
Let’s start again.]