Schubert dub 1

Night and dreams

The post that follows is an extract from my current book-in-progress, tentatively titled Schubert dub. Much more personal than anything I have written before, it is an experimental memoir/essay in listening, bodies and resonance. Even I don’t know how most of it goes yet. The first few extracts posted here will be free to all readers. After February, subsequent extracts, roughly one a month, will be available only to paying subscribers.

If you are new here: welcome! You may like to know that a list of previous instalments can be found here.

The moment resounds.

Night. Somewhere between Clapham and Peckham in south London. I was driving home from a midweek Tai chi and Kung fu class. For two hours, my body had been carving, punching, writhing shapes in the air. I was physically drained, but hyper-aware. The next day, I was going to start work on an extended review of a CD of music for cello and electronics by the Welsh composer Richard Barrett, and I was using my time in the car to listen.

The sodium-slicked roads and terraced shopfronts of southeast London stood in sharp contrast to Barrett’s music. Fragile, tentacular, its sinewy pathways branched through the exoskeleton of my family-friendly Honda like an alien nervous system. I remember appreciating how its elaborate curves – cellist Arne Deforce skimming like a surfer across sheets of electronic noise – felt like echoes of the slow-motion attempts to capture and channel my chi that I had just been practising, and how they rhymed now with the sweeps and turns of my drive.

At this point, I’d known Barrett for close to a decade. His music had accompanied most of my career as a writer; my very first piece of professional journalism was on his setting of Celan, Opening of the Mouth, composed for two voices, ensemble and electronics, and I’d heard and/or written about most of his major works since then. Although the three pieces on this recording – life-form, nacht und träume and Blattwerk – were unfamiliar, I felt confident about the sorts of things Barrett’s music did, and how I might go about my essay.

And then, as I turned the wheel outside the Oval cricket ground to swing right and make my way towards Camberwell, that confidence was upended. I was fifteen minutes deep into nacht und träume, a slithering, haunted trio for cello, electronics and piano. It begins with the sine wave-like tones of piano strings activated by e-bows (small electromagnets that can be placed on the strings to make them ring without interruption), then a stuttering kind of electronic static, like a radio being tuned to a particular station – but the station is broadcasting dead air, so what we hear is only the search, not the thing. In between, Deforce plays his cello with the lightest of bows: all three sounds are made with the delicacy of a lover brushing the hair on your arm. After this extraordinary, erotic opening, the music unfolds in fits of energetic release, like squeezings of paste out of a tube, one thing leading to the next, or turning away from what has happened before.

And then, about two-thirds of the way through, pianist Yutaka Oya picks out two chords. Placed in a delicate soprano register, they clearly aren’t improvised but carefully designed: the precision of their voicing tells us as much. The top note of each stays the same while the middle sidles closer, moving up a step to raise the tension slightly. Together, they form a raised eyebrow, a gentle push into the middle of the dance. And they are tonal: a perfect cadence in reverse, G major, D⁷, a gesture from a much earlier time, something utterly foreign.

What were they doing here? I couldn’t tell, but their impact was unmistakable. A startling interjection, they changed the entire character of what I was listening to, from fragile drones to spirals of instrumental and electronic gestures, spat out seemingly without precedent or consequence. Initially, they could be considered just so much flotsam, dragged into the ever-growing whirlpool of the piece. But then, a minute or so later, something even stranger happened (by now, I was making my way down Camberwell New Road, mindful of the cyclists and mopeds encroaching on either side). The chords resurfaced, only this time transplanted into a richer, baritone register. Once was detail; twice was form.

For weeks after, I kept coming back to the voicing of those chords: how their respective notes were spaced and arranged. They were a perfect balance of reverberation and motion, a sort of afternoon languor combined with the lightest tickle of dissonance. Just two chords, anonymous in almost every respect, little more than dabs of primary colour. But nevertheless, they spoke the name of only one composer: Franz Peter Schubert.

Of course, Barrett’s title had already attuned my ears – it is shared with a well-known Schubert song, written to words by his Viennese contemporary, Matthäus von Collin. And the connection is confirmed at the end of the trio when a recording of that song is added as a concluding fade-out. It emerges gradually at first, heard in spaces between the piano’s slow cascades of notes across the keyboard. The cello adds a few held notes of its own, and at first the recording is disguised, sounding like a clever bit of electronic resonance. But as the piano texture gradually thins out, we can make out a deliberate descending scale in quavers. A voice becomes clear, and the reverberation clarifies into a song. The effect is much like the piano chords from before: you might be hard pushed to know that it is Schubert (although it is a little clearer on this occasion), or to know what song it is (a four-note scale is still rather generic), but you instantly know that it is something. Through reverberation, echo – the facsimile, the decay into nothing – becomes an object in its own right.

As the recording comes still further into the foreground, that transformation is completed. The sound is distorted, to make it appear as if it is coming from an old recording, perhaps even a wax cylinder, and it is impossible to make out who is singing. But the song itself is unmistakable: these are the final bars of Schubert’s shimmering, crepuscular ‘Nacht und Träume’, D.827. We can make out clearly the last seven bars of the voice (‘Kehre wieder heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder’ / ‘Return, holy Night! Fair dreams, return!’), plus the two bars of piano chords with which the song ends. The piano and cello have long stopped by now, and the recording is left to play out to its conclusion.

Barrett’s title draws another connection, too. Nacht und Träume is the title of a television play by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Written in 1982 for Germany’s Süddeutscher Rundfunk and first broadcast on 19 May 1983, it was the last but one of his dramatic works. As listed at the start of its script, its elements comprise: evening light, a dreamer, his dreamt self, dreamt hands (right and left), and the final bars of Schubert’s Lied, beginning again at ‘Kehre wieder heil’ge Nacht!’ (Beckett is only concerned with the vocal melody, so omits the piano’s conclusion). The action is described in thirty short lines. We see the dreamer, in profile, facing right. He hums the last two lines of the Schubert, then the last line again, before appearing to drift off to sleep. We see the dreamt self, in profile, facing left. He is lit by ‘kinder’ light; a hand comforts him, offers him water, wipes his brow. The dream fades out and the two scenes repeat, but with the second in close-up and slower motion than before. The dreamer comes back into the frame before both dreamer and dream fade from view.