Borges Music – Casserley “Labyrinths”
- At September 22, 2018
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
Labyrinths
Lawrence Casserley: Labyrinths (1999)
Live computer processing: Lawrence Casserley
Flutes: Simon Desorgher
Guitar: Richard Durrant
Piano: Carol Morgan
CD: Sargasso SCD 28030 (1999)
Purchase: CD [Amazon]
Online: YouTube [Album Playlist]
Track Listing
1. Labyrinth. For percussion, voice, flute and computer (1989, 21:20)
2. The Garden of Forking Paths. For guitar and computer (1998, 20:40)
I. Syllabic Music
II. The Pavilion of Limpid Solitude
III. The Labyrinth of Time
3. The Monk’s Prayer. For bass flute and computer (1987, 10:36)
4. Vista Clara. For piano and computer (1982, 13:31)
An album consisting of four pieces structured as “musical labyrinths,” Lawrence Casserley’s Labyrinths is a satisfyingly dense and varied collection. Typical of Casserley’s work, each piece uses sophisticated electronics to alter source material produced by traditional musicians. The results are more Karlheinz Stockhausen than Brian Eno, and Labyrinths is highly experimental music—to quote electronic composer Laure Anderson, this is “difficult listening hour!”
The album opens with its strongest piece, “Labyrinth.” Inspired by Borges’ short story “The House of Asterion,” the work is a musical recreation of Theseus’ encounter with the Minotaur, and was designed to accompany a Colourscape installation—an interactive space featuring kaleidoscopic tunnels, colored lights, musicians, dancers, and mime performers. The walls of the labyrinth are constructed from processed gongs and cymbals, Theseus is represented by a solo flute, and the Minotaur is brought to life through heavily distorted vocals.
“Labyrinth” is a powerful piece, projecting a presence that occupies physical space and gives the listener little room to breathe. It starts slowly, a bassy rumble like a disturbance on a vast, subterranean ocean. As the sound of brass gongs is electronically stretched into shimmering walls of sound, the bulk of the piece heaves upwards, a leviathan rising from the deep. Heavy, dark, and menacing, this is music to test your subwoofers, rattle your windows, and send pets scurrying to safety beneath the bed. The entrance of the Minotaur is truly frightening, his one-word questions—“Where? How? Why?”—distorted into a distant and unintelligible bellowing. Only the flute offers any light, its metallic trill shimmering through the cyclopean oppression like Ariadne’s hopeful thread.
While “House of Asterion” may be Casserley’s primary inspiration, Borges’ work is rarely this dark and unrelenting; this haunted vault seems more appropriate to the labyrinths of Lovecraft’s sunken R’lyeh or Danielewski’s ominous House of Leaves. Fifteen minutes into the piece it starts to decay, the flute rising above the grinding bass on a cloud of glittering cymbals. A strange flapping sound is introduced, repeating monotonously like a film reel cycling through a broken projector. As the pitch continues to rise, “Labyrinth” sheds its weight slowly. The bass drops away, the flute fades to black, and the remaining sounds merge into an unsettling whine; a high-pitched drone of insects promising a desert prophecy. (Again, “Labyrinths” seems more Lovecraft than Borges; you could play this piece backwards and name it “Al Azif!”)
Composed in 1989, “Labyrinth” shares many similarities with contemporary ambient industrial music—the genre that would later be known as dark ambient—and it would not seem out of place on a Throbbing Gristle or Nurse With Wound album.
After the suffocating density of “Labyrinth,” it’s a relief to hear the asperity of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Unfortunately, it’s the least compelling work in the collection. The piece is designed to invoke Ts’ui Pên’s “labyrinth of time,” and features a guitar electronically processed to sound like a Chinese instrument. This “exotic” quality is reinforced by the score, a sequence of plinking notes inspired by the pentatonic scales of Ts’ui Pên’s homeland. While “The Garden of Forking Paths” has an appealing sense of economy, there’s little in its twenty-odd minutes to suggest the complexity of Borges’ story. It only becomes interesting in the third movement, when a decrease in tempo produces a dreamy soundscape, each plucked note echoed by a series of ghostly transformations.
“The Garden of Forking Paths” is followed by the excellent “Monk’s Prayer,” a meditation for bass flute inspired by Borges’ poem “The Unending Rose.” According to Casserley, it’s meant to invoke a monk “who kneels at a prayer desk and intones a long prayer on a bass flute, which spreads like ripples over water.” It’s hard to improve upon this description, and the piece contains a quiet reverence not found elsewhere on the album. As the electronically-processed ripples spread, the echoes create subtle interference patterns, and the beauty is tinged with a lovely strangeness, an almost cosmic sense of indifferent serenity—the music of “rivers, firmaments, palaces, and angels.”
The final work on Labyrinths is the only one not directly inspired by Borges. Written for the pianist Clara Rodriguez, “Vista Clara” electronically modulates a piano to change its temperament. Meant to evoke the twists and turns of an elaborate garden maze, “Vista Clara” is a series of pensive explorations, moments of tension released in sudden bursts of frustration. The electronic processing is less evident here than elsewhere on Labyrinths, sometimes noticeable as a distinct, metallic edge on the treble notes. This is most evident during the conclusion, a frantic trill that could be the happy scurry of escape or a final gesture of frustration.
Liner Notes
By John Palmer
Labyrinths
Sargasso, 1999
Lawrence Casserley: The Heart in the Machine
By now, Lawrence Casserley has established himself as one of the most stimulating composers and performers in the British music scene. Sprung from the avantgarde and experimental circuit of the 1960s, his musical output has grown steadily over the past 36 years, covering a wide range of instrumental forces from orchestra and chamber works through to electroacoustic. It is however in the latter medium that Casserley has managed to maintain a distinctly uncompromising profile throughout the years. And when so many composers embraced the safety of the tape medium, he courageously continued to choose the more risky and adventurous path of live-electronics.
Unlike many other musicians working in this field, the electronic medium is for Casserley a physical extension of the musical mind and body. Marshall McLuhan’s claim that ‘technology is the natural extension of man’ finds here an admirable example. There is always a natural cohesion between, say, a guitar and its electronic counterpart: one may be the transformation of the other, but the two sources are always one instrument. It is this unity that makes Casserley’s performances so intriguing. And in the hands of the wizard, electronics become powerful means of expressivity and lyricism taking the listener through labyrinths of sound.
By Lawrence Casserley
Labyrinths have always fascinated me; I have a love of complexity and ambiguity and my music has always tried to follow paths where it was not clear in which direction they might lead. Most particularly, the idea of space of many dimensions, including time as another kind of space, has been an important element in my thinking for many years.
Since the late 1960s my work for instruments and with live electroacoustic processing has frequently placed the musician in the centre of a ‘labyrinth’ of sound. Typically the nature of this ‘labyrinth’ is closely involved in the musical idea. I think of myself not only as a composer, but as an instrument designer. For each of these pieces I have designed a computer instrument that is intimately linked to the acoustic instrument in order to articulate the musical ideas. The instrument and the piece are one concept.
With hindsight it is easy to find the labyrinth in much of my music, but it was not until the late 1980s that I began to explore this theme consciously. It was around this time that I discovered the work of Jorge Luis Borges, a rich new source of articulations for my ideas. The for pieces on this CD span the time from that moment to the present.
Vista Clara (1982) stands at the meeting point of these new ideas and the ‘transformations’ theme that dominated my work in the 1970s, and it contains elements of both. In composing a work for my friend the Venezuelan pianist Clara Rodriguez I sought to escape that I saw as a serious limitation of the piano, its fixed temperament. So in Vista Clara I used the juxtaposition of two different temperaments to generate a transformed piano, both in pitch structure and in timbre. The piano is ring modulated throughout, and the frequency of the modulating oscillator changes at each section. The modulation frequencies are chosen from a scale of twenty-one pitches per octave, and it is the varying degree of ‘fit’ between the two scales that determines the sound quality and the tonal structure of the piece.
But I like to describe “Vista Clara” in quite another way. In the English landscape gardens of the 18th century much use was made of a device called a ha-ha, a ditch designed so that the garden appeared to continue uninterrupted into the surrounding landscape, yet it prevented the cattle from invading the garden and trampling the flower beds. Long vistas could be made, often with a distant obelisk or gothic ruin at the end. “Vista Clara” is a bit like this—it sets off determinedly in a certain direction, only to find the way to the apparent end of the vista blocked by a ha-ha; so it turns and strikes off in a new direction toward a new vista. After several such twists and turns it tries to return to where it started, but here is another ha-ha, and that way too is blocked. This is already a kind of labyrinth.
By The Monk’s Prayer (1987) the labyrinth is the heart of the concept. This piece is part of a music-theatre work, ‘The Unending Rose’, composed for the Electroacoustic Cabaret. The title is that of a Borges poem which contains the lines: “Your fragile globe is in my hand; and time is bending both of us, both unaware, this afternoon, in a forgotten garden”. One of the characters in the theatre piece is a monk, “who kneels at a prayer desk and intones a long prayer on a bass flute, which spreads like ripples over water”. This ‘prayer’ consists of a long melody with a series of optional decorations. The flautist plays the melody once without decoration and then repeats it a number of times with gradually increasing use of the decorations. Once again I have used a richer palette of intervals, this time based on quarter-tones. The sound is fed to a complex delay system, but the labyrinthine delays are only one element; the melody and its decorations form another kind of labyrinth, where the melody folds back on itself and the decorations provide links to other parts of the melody. The multiple layers of quarter-tones build rich sound complexes that explore the borders between harmony and timbre.
Labyrinth (1989), a music-theatre work composed for Colourscape, a walk-in sculpture of colour, is a labyrinth on several levels. Musicians, dancers, and mime artists move among the audience in the ‘labyrinth’ of Colourscape, retelling the myth of the Minotaur, a story with many layers of meaning. This piece uses two processing networks (or labyrinths), one to process gongs and voice, the other to process flute. These networks evolve gradually with little intervention, and the players respond to the changing processes, as well as to each other. The processed gongs represent the sound of the labyrinth itself echoing through the space (in performance many speakers are used). Presently a strange voice is heard—the Minotaur, who inhabits the labyrinth. The Minotaur’s text in another Borges inspiration, consisting entirely of questions: How? Where? When? etc., and above all Why? Theseus is a flute, but a flute with electroacoustic transformations that mask and extend his original sounds. He enters the labyrinth, cautiously at first, gradually becoming more aggressive. Finally there is a confrontation with the Minotaur, which leads through conflict to a kind of resolution. I imagine this as a ritual movement in some larger cycle of existence.
Here, as in “Vista Clara,” I have used computer processing to enrich the pitch palette—due to the complex delays and frequency shifts each gesture of the performers results in the production of many pitches.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1996) returns once more to Borges and to the labyrinth. In this story he presents the idea of a labyrinth “forking in time, not in space…an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times”. The computer instrument for this piece is more complex. There are three separate, but related, instruments, corresponding to the three sections, each growing out of a quotation from the story:
1—“A high-pitched, almost Syllabic Music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind”,
2—“The Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude stood in the centre of a garden”,
3—The Labyrinth of Time “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my Garden of Forking Paths”.
The labyrinth of time is one of Borges’ most beautiful and powerful conceptions. “The Garden of Forking Paths” represents the culmination of the labyrinth idea in my music. Here, the long-held vision of a labyrinth “forking in time, not in space” has found some form of realization. Where will it lead from here? I can only “leave to the various futures (not all) my Garden of Forking Paths”.
Borges: “The Unending Rose”
Five hundred years in the wake of the Hegira,
Persia looked down from its minarets
on the invasion of the desert lances,
and Attar of Nishapur gazed on a rose,
addressing it in words that had no sound,
as one who thinks rather than one who prays:
“Your fragile globe is in my hand; and time
is bending both of us, both unaware,
this afternoon, in a forgotten garden.
Your brittle shape is humid in the air.
The steady, tidal fullness of your fragrance
rises up to my old, declining face.
But I know you far longer than that child
who glimpsed you in the layers of a dream
or here, in this garden, once upon a morning.
The whiteness of the sun may well by yours
or the moon’s gold, or else the crimson stain
on the hard sword-edge in the victory.
I am blind and I know nothing, but I see
there are more ways to go; and everything
is an infinity of things. You, you are music,
rivers, firmaments, palaces, and angels,
O endless rose, intimate, without limit,
which the Lord will finally show to my dead eyes.”
—Translation by Alastair Reid
Additional Information
Additional InformationLawrence Casserley Homepage
Casserley’s own web site offers information about his life and works.
Sargasso Records
The page for Labyrinths at Sargasso Records.
Colourscape
This promotional video shows a Colourscape installation.
Lawrence Casserley Borges-Related Works
Lawrence Casserley Main Page
Return to the Garden of Forking Path’s Lawrence Casserley profile.
Solar Wind (1997)
A joint project by Lawrence Casserley and British saxophonist Evan Parker, Solar Wind bears a quotation from Borges’ “The Circular Ruins.” [Link takes you to Bandcamp]
The Edge of Chaos (2002)
A sequel to Labyrinths, this album features a series of electroacoustic pieces inspired by the artwork of Antoni Tàpies bookended by two Borges parables, “Ragnarök” and “Everything and Nothing.”
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 9 September 2024
Borges Music Page: Borges Music
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com