richard barrett
page four

Dahlhaus, in fact, said that it doesn't resist; in fact, it plays into it more strongly than a composed work, since the system of improvisation is already frozen and has invented its own vocabulary of clichés. I should say that I don't agree with Dalhaus's personal feelings at all; it is very conservative and, most importantly, was written twenty-five years ago.

Improvisation was a different thing in those days.  

But I find the ideas relevant.

It's certainly relevant to think about how one can resist the tendency of culture to commodify what we're doing, and I wouldn't say that improvised music is a heroic member of the resistance to all these tendencies of late capitalist society. I do think it's possible to see compositional practice in a way which resists commodification as well. I mean, it's very easy for someone to simply say, "I don't think what I do is packaged into convenient little lumps that the culture industry feeds from;" but in a sense, it is one reason that I tend to write compositions as part of larger series, such as negatives, for instance, where the five pieces can be played separately, but when played together constitute a complementary world of relationships with one another. I don't see one composition as being a complete state of anything—it can't be, anyway, because it's impossible to say everything you need to say in one score, and it's also impossible to hear things that way: the sounds of the piece are surrounded by sounds of other kinds, other pieces of music on the concert program, or simultaneous sounds of life. For example, a passage of a particular piece might have a stronger relationship to a passage in another piece than it does to anything in the piece to which it actually belongs.  

You're thinking of specific motifs, not just elements of a general vocabulary? 

Well one example is the reappearance of octaves at various unusual times during the negatives series. It constitutes a strand of musical discourse which is underground almost all the time. I feel that the process of making music as a composer is going on much more continuously than the more or less arbitrary chopping off of pieces of one's imaginative journal would lead one to expect. In reality, what one is doing is thinking about music and developing one's ideas all the time, and every now and again a document comes out, a work in progress, reached at an arbitrary point in time. Which is why I'm not keen on revising things; I think that, for better or worse, a particular work was the best that I could do at the time. If it falls flat on its face, then that's simply what is documented. If I try to improve it, I might end up making it even worse anyway. When something works, I usually try to do it again, trying at the same time to discover what's going on there, what it means when a musical idea works. My string quartet is a most extreme example: the huge disparity between the durations of formal elements which have equal structural weight. Sometimes things get cut off when they've just started, while other things go on far beyond their expected, or even desired, duration. I would like to think that this encourages listeners to make their own decisions about how they relate to the passage of time as it's articulated in the piece.  

What are your current projects?  

At the moment, I'm working on one main project which incorporates the clarinet piece and also pieces already written for bass clarinet, solo violin, flute, and percussion. The pieces are incorporated within a much more rarified structure than that of negatives; instead of a series of solo pieces which are more or less accompanied, these solo pieces themselves become exploded into strands which almost have the status of themes. When a particular instrument reappears playing its specific material or a transmutation of it, it is understood that the instrument's strand of activity has been going on since the beginning of the work, and simply has not been audible for some time. In other words, the boundaries between the constituent compositions in this conglomerate work become less and less easy to work out. I conceive of the work as a fugue, in fact, although it will be well over an hour long. It begins with a piece which will exist in its own right for solo vibraphone; halfway through that, the bass clarinet part begins. As it goes on, the constituent pieces, or the constituent thematic strands, become more and more intertwined, until one arrives at an extreme stretto situation where all the musics are heard in quick succession, superimposed.

The element that holds all this together is a series of poems by Paul Celan. I refer to Celan in the preface to negatives, and this is a body of work which I've been getting into very seriously in the last few years. I suppose it's a summation of what I think about currently. It relates not only to the poems that are set, but, more generally, to his use of language, subject matter, and his own biographical circumstances. Originally it was intended to be an opera, but the libretto never came to light, and so I decided to throw away the idea of a libretto and keep everything else. The whole work is much more allusive than explicit, because of course the material that Celan is dealing with is not something that one can be explicit about. One can get only as explicit as he does. One of the fascinations for me in the way that he deals with the Nazi period in Germany is his attempt to reconstruct an expressive, profound, meaningful language out of the ruins left by the Third Reich. To a certain extent, that process is a model for any artist in the late twentieth century trying to relate to the century's experience, trying to keep it alive in however small a way. That's one strand to it: another strand is connected to another interest of mine, ancient history, particularly Egypt. The entire piece is called Opening of the Mouth [commissioned by the Festival of Perth and premiered in March 1997], taking its name from a part of the mummification ceremony that gives a voice to the deceased person, in order that they be able to bear witness, in the afterlife, to their lifetime rights and wrongs, upon which a great deal would depend. This formed a parallel to Celan, since in his own work he gives a voice to millions of people who were denied one of their own. The search into the past, and the search into Celan's own past, and also the search into the past of our own culture trawling up more or less distorted ancient ideas and artifacts—these are all things that have interested me for a long time. I can't speak very eloquently about this work since it's in progress, but when it's finished you won't be able to stop me.