Nachtmusik

Struggling along with musical things.



I've previously transcribed a small section of Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang, which as you probably already know was put to great use by Keiller in 'London'.

But Keiller also used Brahm's Alto Rhapsody in the film, indeed, it's the very first piece of music one encounters in the film, staring across from London Bridge towards Tower Bridge, with the Celine-baiting "It is a journey to the end of the world" as the opening line. Music for Keiller frequently seems to be used with very specific meanings, the 'convalesence' of the Beethoven presumably corresponding to the cure for the 'malady' of London (as well as the script's specific reference to convalescence when Robinson first comes back out after the Tory victory), while one can draw parallels between Robinson in Space's analytical study of the aesthetics of British capitalism and the desperate job-seeker music from Kuhle Wampe.
And then the Alto Rhapsody crops up again in Keiller's exhibition at the Tate (which I CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH), with a pair of headphones allowing you to listen to Kathleen Ferrier singing Goethe's tale of peripatetic woe while also looking at an image of the lichen which may or may not be a silhouette of the great German polymath.
As you can imagine, it was buzzing around in my head for a while, so I thought that I'd try to get a little bit of it down, so here are the first few bars or so. One could probably keep going but there is never enough time...




And then Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died. As someone said, perhaps the very last 'great' voice that there will be. One shouldn't be too sad - he lifted the hearts of millions and lived to a very grand old age, but I felt moved enough to quickly bash out a little Schubert song - 'An die Musik', with the final line "Du holde Kunst, Ich danke dir dafür!"




And also a little sketch I made using the sound of people milling about and drinking outside my flat, with a quasi-late romantic dressing. I'm not sure where something like this leads to, but perhaps it's the beginnings of an attempt to understand the difference between the quotidian and the romantic, with particular regard to the different poles of artistic satisfaction and metaphysical dread. Or something.

London Bridge, 1st November

For various reasons, the 1st of November 2011 was not the sort of day one wishes to go through. As part of this horrid spin I had occasion to walk across London Bridge along with the lord knows how many other thousands pass across as it as well, perhaps a six figure number. Before reaching the bridge however, I had to walk through the bus station, which as I have mentioned before, is in the process of a slow demolition and replacement, its roof being torn apart in one place, propped up in another, almost intact in small sections. And as I walked under it it on this damp November morning it was hard not to see it as some kind of allegory.

Along with the space frame, those pointed and strange lanterns over the rooflights are other details that we're unlikely to see again once the current generation of 40-odd year old buildings are demolished and forgotten. One has to admit that they do not make for a pleasant sight, ungainly, savage almost, like awkward teeth. But they have a purpose and they also strangely work as well, with a rhythm that compliments the spindles of the frames below. Indeed, at this late stage in their life they create a strange mimetic effect with the additional grey steel support truss on the underside of the roof.

The roof is truncated & incomplete, but in a strange reversal it begins to give the impression that it is poised in the process of expansion, just waiting to be extended out to accommodate some kind of growth. It seems both to be on its way up, but also on its way down, and we know what that means: the ruin.

Ruin. You might say: who built that? You might also say: who destroyed that?

-Victor Hugo, on the barricades of 1848

And then not only the secondary structure of the trusses that hold the roof up for now, but also an extra structure of scaffolding. This leads to a frankly ridiculous profusion of vector-like members, spiderish and confusing, fragile in appearance. There's nothing pretty about it, yet seeing it like this allows us to appreciate the effect that engineering architecture first had upon people - its very lack of weight and expressive detail made it troubling and ugly to nearly all who saw it. It wasn't long of course that we learned the engineering aesthetic of rationality and became masters of it, somewhat numbing it, but when we see a scruffy mess like this we can catch a glimpse in ourselves of that original reaction.

A couple of days ago I recorded a brief clip of Beethoven, a piece which has been on my mind a lot recently. You might remember that the 'Heiliger Dankgesang' features prominently in Patrick Keiller's film 'London', and indeed there are a number of shots from the film that focus on the commuters in and around London Bridge and the station. There is of course a melancholy eye that you can place onto a scene like this, whereby the thousands of nameless people streaming out of the door make it seem as if the city itself were taking a deep sighing breath. Caught in this stream one gets a sense of the countless bodies who have wafted across the Thames for work over the last millenia, and London becomes some kind of sad entity in itself. The fragile yearning in the Beethovian counterpoint is a perfect match for the sense of disappearance inherent to the wash of commuters, endlessly repeated with slowly changing actors. But here, under the drab sky we are reminded that nothing repeats without change, and we see a building belonging to one era being crushed beneath the brute weight of its replacement, the Shard.

Beethoven - Heiliger Dankgesang

Beethoven - Heiliger Dankgesang, op.132 (fragment) - guitar by entschwindet und vergeht
Here is another fragment of music for you. This is a portion of Beethoven's 'Heiliger Dankgesang', or song of holy thanks. It's a magnificent example of modal writing, with barely any accidentals in the long exalted passages from which my little transcription comes, and an all-over mood of almost unbearably serene melancholy.

If you're not already familiar with it you might actually recognise the piece from its use in Keiller's 'London', where it bestows the drabness of quotidian London with an exquisite shimmer of yearning.