Schubert dub 7
Skull and skin
The following is an extract from my current book-in-progress, Schubert dub. If you are new here: welcome! You may like to know that a list of previous instalments can be found here.
Those two chords in nacht und träume still echoed. Searching for meaning, I discovered at least where they were from: the Adagio of the C minor sonata, D958. There, they echo eerily behind all that movement’s nostalgic tread; when I ask him, Barrett tells me it was their occurence at the movement’s end, as part of its harmonically unravelling coda, that was of particular importance. ‘It’s obviously not just any two chords’, he says. ‘It’s a turning point where the music seems to enter another world at a certain moment. A pivot to some other state of consciousness, perhaps.’
Schubert’s appearance in nacht und träume had been foreshadowed more than decade earlier, in Barrett’s first work for orchestra, Vanity, composed between 1990 and 1994. Vast in concept and proportion, this monumental work ends on the head of a pin: a hushed cadence, played by string quartet, taken unmistakably and utterly disarmingly from – yes – ‘Death and the Maiden’. There are clues that it’s coming: the processional last movement coalesces with an almost inevitable momentum onto that dactyl rhythm. But even then, that final gesture comes as a shock, its tonal sweetness sounding truly like another world.
And again: why Schubert? Why here?
Like me, Barrett came to Schubert late. Beckett was the catalyst, he tells me, the playwright’s fascination suggesting he should take more notice himself. And ‘Death and the Maiden’ was his way in, Beckett having had a particular fondness for the theme. In the 1956 radio play All that Fall, the elderly Maddy Rooney hears a recording of the quartet as she trudges down to Boghill station to surprise her husband on his birthday. The theme also appears on an LP, MacGowran Speaking Beckett, on which an arrangement of Schubert’s theme played on harmonium and flute by Beckett’s cousin, John, and nephew, Edward, bookends extracts from Endgame, Molloy, The Unnamable and other texts read by the renowned Irish actor Jack MacGowran. A perfect complement to MacGowran’s crisp enunciations, the music is cool, expressively expressionless. Between tracks, the playwright himself adds the ping of a soft, high gong.
Barrett knew both these creations. But the clincher on his journey to Schubert was a very different record. In the mid-80s, and temporarily homeless, Barrett lodged for a few months in Rotterdam with his friend Steve Martland, a composer of muscular, dance-inspired music pitched somewhere between Purcell and Manchester’s Hacienda nightclub. Martland was nearing the end of his studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. His teacher was the iconoclastic Louis Andriessen – known for his politically radical, peculiarly Dutch takes on minimalism: 68-er revolutionism bound in crisp, parallel lines – and when Andriessen was on tour, Barrett would cat-sit for him. The accommodation was welcome, but the prize was Andriessen’s record collection. Between feeding the cats, Barrett copied as much of it as he could onto tape.
