for string quartet
after Bill Viola’s Arc of Life
Duration: approximately 25 minutes
I. Firebirth
II. The Path
III. The Deluge
IV. The Voyage
V. First Light
I have long been a passionate fan of Bill Viola’s work, having first come across it
in a retrospective show back in 1998 at Whitney Museum in New York. I was so mesmerized at that time by how the work, which was at once so immediate, was also imbued with a timeless and even spiritual logic. These works were highly immersive- you literally entered them, and so they became your reality temporarily- you could not help but accept their reason for being. I was amazed that each work was so distinctive from one another and also so memorable- they were often single event/concept works which went immediately to some deeper realm. I could probably recall all of the works I saw there that day all these seventeen years later.
This year has happily also been full of more Bill Viola experiences. I had the good fortune to be asked to participate in this Arc of Life project, which by chance also coincided with other non-related trips to London and Paris. These trips afforded me the opportunity to see his new works at St. Paul’s Cathedral (the marvelous Martyrs work) and the retrospective show at the Grand Palais in Paris, which had some amazing early works as well as the new stuff. It was fascinating to see the gems that came out of that early video splicing technology. Most importantly for the purposes at hand, however, at the Grand Palais was the giant room of the five remarkable Going Forth By Day video panels, which were very large in scale. I immediately had the strong sense that this was one of his grandest opuses- a work which had a cumulative contrapuntal weight unlike anything I had ever seen. It is, as all his works are, imbued with an unusual sense of patience and time, each with a different affect, and each drawing on something from the larger archetypes of spirituality. People came and sat on the floor for hours taking it in. I was happy to be able to experience the full cycle of the videos, which runs about a half an hour. The way densities, objects, dramatic events, and speeds of those panels interact over the course of that cycle proved deeply psychologically affecting to me and was the motivating inspiration behind my own work, Five.
Each of my own piece’s five movements takes a title of the video panels from Mr. Viola’s work (happily with permission!). Fire Birth, is a cauldron of churning from which essential motivic ideas emerge for the entire piece. This is something I have been leaning toward in my recent output- using a common ‘DNA’ of materials between different movements, but with very different characters and results. The second movement, The Path, takes the pastoral and beautiful walking motion from Mr. Viola’s panel, and uses it as a starting point for the pacing of my own work. One of the things that struck me in this very horizontally stretched video is the way the number of people in a space changing over time provides a kind of ‘seasonal’ aspect to the way time flows. This is not a dramatic panel, but in the context of the other works is an essential reference point, and I felt the same way about this movement in my piece. There is something also transcendent about the gentle motion of the people coalescing and dispersing over time that was lovely.
The Deluge is a kind of stylized street scene- a static building front which pedestrians of all walks of life pass at various speeds in front of a doorway. It is related to the walking in The Path, but it has its own logic. The vocabulary of this movement in my piece takes similar material from the second movement but puts it into a more anxiety filled context, after Mr. Viola’s example. At a certain point, in a kind of moment of magical realism, an enormous deluge of water starts to spill out of the door, driving away the people, forcing them to abandon the mundane rituals of their daily routine. This cataclysm is also reflected in my music. This for me, along with First Light, has strong overtones of 9/11, though I have no idea if Mr. Viola intended any of that.
The fourth movement, The Voyage, contrasts the serenity of water, with its gentle ripples, and the growing realization that someone is seeing their parent or loved one departing their mortal existence. That awareness is lyrical and painful as it also comes with the awareness that the observer is also trapped in a box viewing the whole thing without recourse. I used gentle undulating sounds from the quartet which resemble breathing as the backdrop for more lyrically involved moments.
The fifth movement is based on the modest panel which perhaps haunted me the most, First Light. The image of firefighters at water’s edge after some evidently exhausting battle, morale broken, physical beings broken, but again dropped into a peaceful context, creates a powerful image. Time moves very slowly, and one by one, the men fall asleep. At a certain moment, after an enormous period of time has passed (just when you think you know what you are seeing), and in a rhyme with the magical realism of The Deluge, a young man ascends heavenward from out of the water. I loved the way this was done so beautifully but yet modestly and in an understated fashion. In my work, I tried to have a rising chant-like moment in the music create a kind of parallel to the imagery.
In all of these videos, the logic of when things happen was very important, and I felt like I both learned and absorbed something from this. It has been a pleasure to write this work as a response to Bill Viola’s grand opus, and also an honor to write for the great Miro String Quartet again.
—Christopher Theofanidis
Biography