Duration: ca. 30 minutes
I. In my beginning is my end
II. A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)
III. Knowledge imposes a pattern
IV. The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
The Henschel String Quartet:
Christoph Henschel, Alex Fortes, violins; Monika Henschel, viola; Mathias Beyer-Karlshoj, 'cello
with Donald Berman, piano
At the Still Point (2013), for piano quintet, was commissioned as part of an interdisciplinary response to T.S. Eliot’s epic cycle of poetry, Four Quartets. This project was initiated by Bruce Herman and Makoto Fujimura, both of whom had lived with Four Quartets for many years, and as visual artists felt the desire to respond to the themes of the work on canvas, each creating eight panels that were displayed together in many locations, always including a performance of my work as well. Bruce and Mako are both truly exceptional artists, with deeply committed Christian and spiritual orientations, and each has a distinctive artistic voice- Bruce is allegorical and often figurative, and Mako is abstract with a deeply opulent impulse.
Eliot’s work was mostly written against the backdrop of World War II, and virtuosically uses text repetition and variation, positivistic statements and their immediate antitheses, and structural invention as a way to create a kind of vortex arriving at its central theme, all of which unfolds as a discourse on time, decay, and meaning.
The struggle to reconcile the eternal with the transitory in Eliot’s work became the ambition and foundation for the thinking in my own piece. There is a slow unfolding of the deeper relationships of the opening materials of the music to the greater form of the work. In the Eliot, there is a swirling set of ideas and phrases which thread the poems, but which come to a focal point around what Eliot refers to as “the still point of the turning world.” This is the eternal, and it is a perceptual unpeeling, a realization.
In the first movement of At the Still Point the varied refrain in Eliot’s work, “In my beginning is my end,” sets the large structural ideas into play. The musical figure which starts the piece becomes a kind of “Ur-pattern” for the work—a generative shape permeating all of the subsequent material. It is a group of four notes: a single note followed by a lower note, then reversed lower–upper. To me, this figure has implicit in it a kind of balance and an evocation of a central paradox of Eliot’s poem: “And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
The melodic idea that grows organically out of this UR-pattern sounds like a Gregorian chant. And since Gregorian chant has a sense of being “outside” of time (it is not locked to a grid of pulse, but sung freely), it also acts as a freeing agent to take us outside of our local sense of time at any given moment. This melody presents the intervals that are essential to both the melodic and harmonic fabric of the entire piece, a third and a second, and is then infringed upon by dismantling, temporal actors, which continue to appear throughout all four movements.
The first of these is a dramatically widening vibrato, which seems to literally disrupt the pitch stability of the materials. This material acts as a kind of existential threat to what we feel we know about the harmonic and melodic language of the work. The second antagonist/destabilizing actor appears as a confrontation of pulse, putting a different speed of line on top of another one to challenge our understanding of the flow of time— first heard in the chant-like melody, but then taking many other forms. In some small way, both of these disruptive actors for me represent the idea of opposites to the basic grounded material, and in this, responded to the way opposites seem to confront and collide with each other in the Eliot.
Over the course of each of the four movements, another metaphor guided my thinking as well: the idea of wave-particle duality in physics. It was this concept that provided me with a key to try and reconcile all of these seemingly conflicting musical elements. In physics, wave-particle duality is the paradox that light can act as both a particle and a wave—physical states which seem not to be possible by the same particle. To this end, in the music, the disrupting forces of the widening vibrato and the layering of speed play the essential role in actually redeeming their own disruptive natures. By the fourth movement the vibrato softens to become a slowed-down version of itself: pulsation without pitch variance: a kind of breathing. This is also the gradual effect of the layering of speeds: a freedom from pulse. Hopefully the end result of these transformations reveal a kind of unity of purpose.
At the Still Point was made possible by the Fujimura Institute through the generosity of Denise and Stephen Adams. The piece lasts approximately 30 minutes.
Quote from the Eliot:
And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.
—Christopher Theofanidis
Biography