THE NOSTALGIC UTOPIAN FUTURE DISTANCE

In the early 1980s, Kaija Saariaho experienced a shift in her musical outlook, switching from the strict serialism she had studied previously in the pursuit of something more eclectic and experimental. At IRCAM, the computer music research centre in Paris founded by Pierre Boulez in 1977, she began experimenting with different ways of creating sound, particularly with using electronics in the interrogation of sound’s properties, and used spectral composers such as Tristan Murail and Gerard Grisey as models. Early works from Saariaho’s new period included the Jardin Secret trilogy (1985-7), for tape alone and instruments with electronics, and Lichtbogen (1986), the first time Saariaho worked with computers in the context of purely instrumental music. 

Saariaho’s Petals, written in 1988, was another work that resulted from that creative shift. Petals came directly from discarded or unused ideas she had in the creation of Nymphèa, the third of the Jardin trilogy, for string quartet and electronics. (“It was like she collected these petals and made them into a cello piece,” the cellist Anssi Karttunen, who premiered the piece, has said.)  

For solo cello with or without electronics, in Petals there’s an emphasis on finding new sounds and textures through a variety of live techniques: varying the pressure, speed and placement of the bow on the instrument, changing the density of the sound through the use of harmonics, and playing with a mix of different types of vibrato. The electronics—consisting of a cellist playing through a microphone into a mixer, with the sound being put back the system via a  reverb dial and a harmonizer—can be played live, or be pre-programmed. “If the sound is already 3-D,” Karttunen has said, the electronic element of Petals represents “the opening up of a fourth dimension.” 

Hugh Morris 2024 

Pierre Boulez, composer, conductor, and arch polemicist, described the intention of his 1952 piece Structures I as follows: 

“I wanted to eradicate from my vocabulary absolutely every trace of the conventional, whether it concerned figures and phrases, or development and form; I then wanted gradually, element after element, to win back the various stages of the compositional process, in such a manner that a perfectly new synthesis might arise, a synthesis that would not be corrupted from the very outset by foreign bodies—stylistic reminiscences in particular.” 

It’s interesting, then, to compare this sentiment with Dialogue de l’ombre double, a piece from three decades later which is indelibly linked to a particularly pungent “foreign body”: the theatre. The inspiration for the piece came from a scene in Paul Claudel’s Le Soulier de Satin, an eleven-hour verse epic written in 1929. Boulez’s title, meaning “dialogue of the double shadow,” comes from a moment in Claudel’s thirteenth scene when a man and a woman are projected together onto a wall. The piece uses this as its jumping off point; live clarinet plays with its sonic shadow, a pre-recorded clarinet spatialized around the concert space using loudspeakers. 

The piece is not theatrical, but has a certain literary feel, like one of the long unbroken multi-voiced monologues you might find in the works of James Joyce. The music contrasts between “stanzas” (played live) and “transitions” (prerecorded), and dialogue between the two parts, though this aspect is better imagined as two forks of a split personality than a conversation between two different voices. Dialogue is full of a darting and rhythmic vitality, and serves as a great inroad into Boulez’s art. 

Hugh Morris 2024 

The nostalgic-utopian distance 

is friend to me and despairing  

in continuous restlessness 

Luigi Nono was a lifelong Marxist. Brought up in Mussolini’s Italy, he joined the Italian Communist Party in 1952, and early works—Il canto sospeso, Intolleranza 1960, La fabbrica illuminata—demonstrated Nono’s desire to create socially engaged art. He ploughed an individual furrow which few followed (though, in Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado, he had some high-profile supporters): an enthusiastic proponent of serial techniques, Nono was also driven by the belief that all artistic creation should be motivated by egalitarian principles. He was a keen proponent of using the most up-to-date technologies available to him, under the belief that this was the only way to best speak to the current moment. 

La lontananza is crammed full of ideas, both musical and philosophical. Subtitled “madrigal for many wanderers with Gidon Kremer,” the “wanderers” idea refers to a section of a poem by Antonio Machado that Nono discovered on a wall of a cloister in Toledo—“Wanderer, there are no ways, only the wandering”—that Nono reflected on in other late works. (La lontananza was one of the last works he wrote before he died.) The “wanderer” also refers to the mechanics of La lontananza’s realisation. Sheet music is divided across multiple music stands, and the performer travels through the space. (The first performer, Gidon Kremer, is imbued directly into the work, with recordings of his speech and other off-cuts from Nono and Kremer’s recording sessions making it into the final tape recording. Performers today wander with Nono and Kremer together.) 

The title, meanwhile, references a complicated bit of Marxist thought. Its dedicatee, the composer Salvatore Sciarrino, explained it as follows: “the past reflected in the present (nostalgica) brings about a creative utopia (utopica), the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible (futura) through the medium of distance (lontananza).” It seems that Nono, through this piece, is prefiguring ideas of hauntology popularised by Jacques Derrida, and later Mark Fisher. But for contemporary audiences, where future nostalgia is an ever-present part of pop culture, and where the radical, futuristic dreams of previous generations fade further into the distance with each passing day, perhaps this idea isn’t as complicated as first thought. 

The piece lasts for a maximum of sixty minutes. The solo violinist is accompanied by eight channels of tape, controlled by a sound technician who must be as attentive as the soloist. And, across the eight tapes, it’s not just other violin sounds that are heard, but everyday ephemera recorded during the process too (doors, voices, words, chairs). La lontananza is a haunted essay on time—looking forward, falling back, remembering, dreaming, and remembering how to dream. 

Hugh Morris 2024