Breathing of Statues
Notes from an Arvo Pärt concert
Trisagion
The music spoke to me of my own inadequacy. It laid out a white tablecloth, and I stained it with thoughts, loud as voices. I should have fallen to my knees. I wasn’t worthy to receive it; my head was jammed with spurious words.
It spoke of my inadequacy, but gently, lovingly. It walked its measured step and said: I am still here. It slowed time down to let me catch it; it sped time up to not sound slow.
Against the candle-lit orchestra, I could almost hear it: within each person in the room, a swirl of thoughts; the same music.
The music spoke of our inadequacy, lovingly but impartially. Where it came from, words were mere chidren. They knew so little; they were exactly as they should be. O music,
you language where all language
ends!
Concerto Piccolo über B-A-C-H
Gold cuts through the silence: the spotlit trumpet.
It splits the piece in two. The dissonant, despairing orchestra; the lonely soloist, as heartbreakingly beautiful as if the baroque had never ended.
With the cut, something is exposed. But what? The two halves sit uneasily — but they don’t feel unease.
The trumpet fanfares his own funeral. Someone doesn’t know something: the orchestra lamenting a living soul, the soloist who thinks he lives?
Tabula Rasa I : Ludus
Some compositions are small creatures, originating in the instrument, and not the musician. They must be coaxed out, ear pressed against the violin in pious concentration. Take the miracle for granted, and the capricious beastie remains asleep in her wooden burrow. As a replacement, she’ll at most send out a virtuosic weasel.
Arvo Pärt’s pieces ask for more than coaxing. Ideally, the musician would simply disappear. Ideally, the violins would go too, leaving only the music.
I’m startled to find that there are soloists, in this piece which is so patently indivisible. In this piece which knows no space, only time, how is it that one voice stands a foot from another?
The sounds cross in the air like birds; the flock hovers motionless, self-contained.
Tabula Rasa II: Silentium
Music: breathing of statues.
Notes like walking, like breathing — over a depthless lake. I want to enter the water, hear eternity. My ears, the stubborn bouys, won’t submerge.
I curse my human senses. They condemn me to follow the rocking, soprano swells of first violin — mere decoration over the fathomless depths.
I sense the true music out of the corner of my ear. I turn towards it, and it’s like looking straight into the sun. The brightest light extinguished.
Then I know. The gentle soprano is my guide, taking me through such glimpses of eternity as a mortal is allowed.
The only way in is by breathing.
You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.
Coda
I want to say, falsely, that Tabula Rasa moves from darkness to light. It does, more or less, though where it comes from, everything is light.
What else can you say to music which is silence? You can read it Rilke: gently, lovingly, impartially.
To Music¹
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? — : into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out, —
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.
[1] Translated by Stephen Mitchell.
