“Mundanity & Prayer”
It was a true joy this past week to have this piece performed by my dear friends Laura Reid and Jiajia Li, under their wonderful moniker “Who Cares?”. I adore what they do, and what they have done with this project. My appreciation for their generosity in inviting me to be a part of this cannot be thoroughly enough expressed. Be sure to follow them on YouTube for the rest of their videos!
I want to expound upon a few points I had hurriedly texted them before the premiere (and that appear on the youtube description). As with any go my ramblings, consider these questions, not proclamations.
Variation as Forgetting
I am skeptical of a musical discourse that takes for granted something called a “composer”, and in turn such a person’s inherent genius and inventiveness. One facet of this particularly twisted topic undoubtedly touches on that of compositional techniques, and a capital-C Composer’s endless inventiveness in their deployment.
This suggests a sort of making music, or making art more generally, that rings a little too linear to me. Too clean. Too prescriptive. I’m much more of the mind that we are more likely stumbling about, always in search of the music that gradually begins to make itself known. We are in a continual state of accepting things as they emerge, even as they confound our sensibilities, or defy the “correct” way to assemble a piece, rather than directing them. Mistakes become framed as intent, and in response, intentional constructions get discarded as horrible ideas. The whole premise that one knows what they are doing begins to melt. Che disastro!
Instead of an adept technical expression, I wonder what might happen if we think of using a compositional technique as an activity of total ineptitude, dare I say, joyful incompetence. Instead of thinking of “Variations” as a gradual departure from the surface texture of a “Theme” (typically in increasingly ornamental or virtuosic ways), or as an obscurantist exercise in demonstrating the composer’s intellect in disguising and concealing the “Theme”, what would happen if we were to think of Variation with the aforementioned incompetence?
I think of this activity as trying to recreate the initial magic of the theme, the “good tune”, the material one thought of as being worthy of elevation to the structural core of the piece in the first place, and falling short each time. Failing to capture the effectiveness of the “opening salvo”, and in this failing, growing further and further away from being able to remember what that mesmerizing quality was in the first place. Like a person desperate to re-live a treasured memory, discovering that they can never retrieve its glory (I should mention that one ought to move on from such an acitivity- anything other than an abandonment of this glorified past would be something akin to the ground floor of fascism!).
Rituals, Routines, Empty Gestures
Capital-R Rituals are things of such curiosity for me. I can never ascertain what my relationship to them is, exactly, but it is certainly one of an observer, an outsider, perhaps an exile. I have always been skeptical of the degree to which people claim to fervently buy into the meaning or desired effect of these sacred or holy acts. From my view from afar it seems, rather, that these ritualized activities are inherently orthopraxic, by which I take to mean a sense of “practice over faith”. In this sense of acting without thought, Rituals are, unsurprisingly, a breeding ground for projection. I like to describe this in terms of the “forgetting” that is required for their function. In the post-modern condition that corrodes our way of life, it should make sense that we find actions meant to be deep or rich with meaning, are just as empty as the rest of our mundane daily actions.
This leads me to wonder where one might locate this threshold between ritual and routine in the first place. We assume such a distinction would be obvious, one is “holy”, the other decidedly not. But given our proclivity for orthopraxic behavior (such ease to act, less so to reflect!), I struggle to accept that these sacred rituals are actually undertaken with appropriate consideration, thought, or piety. What is the connection between acts of devotion and those of ablution? How ubiquitous might these empty gestures be?
