Borges Music – Reynolds: Voicespace III, “Eclipse”

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Voicespace III, “Eclipse”
(1978–1980)
Length: 16 min.

Quadraphonic computer generated sound and electroacoustically processed voices.
Text fragments by Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Kobayashi Issa, James Joyce, Herman Melville, and Wallace Stevens.
Processing: Roger Reynolds.
Voice: Philip Larson & Carol Plantamura.

Like all of Reynold’s “Voicespace” pieces, Eclipse is a work which blurs the boundaries between poetry, music, and ritual. Divided into four parts, Eclipse uses electronics to enhance, alter, and accompany fragmentary readings about the sun and moon. These readings are drawn from some of Reynold’s favorite authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Kobayashi Issa, James Joyce, Herman Melville, and Wallace Stevens.

Part I of Eclipse has no text, and consists solely of electronic music. It’s quite beautiful, graceful swells of sound gradually merging into a pleasantly oscillating texture, accompanied by distant bells and shimmering grace notes. The entrance of the soprano marks the beginning of Part II, her first word electronically stretched into a single, quavering line. The poems are delivered slowly, a quiet duet between Larson and Plantamura articulated in alternating stanzas, words, and syllables. Part III is more robust, the poems delivered with orotund pomposity as an electronic drone thickens into a rumble. The highlight of this section is Plantamura’s extended quotation from García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. A slurry of words that tumble over each other as they spill from her mouth, the final line is delivered with comic clarity and force: “the almond trees at the former Dutch lunatic asylum!”

A lunatic asylum is an apt description for the final part of Eclipse. After a short electronic prelude, the poems arrive fast and furious, enunciated in a variety of styles. A fragment from Moby-Dick concludes the piece: “the sun hides not . . . the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon.” Appropriately for a Melville quotation, the electronics recede like a retreating tide, recalling the beginning of the piece and neatly closing the circle.

Eclipse is experimental music, and shares similarities with the early electroacoustic vocal manipulations of Karlheiz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music, and experimental albums such as Björk’s Medulla. Of all three “Voicespace” pieces collected on the album, Eclipse is the strongest, and sounds the least dated to modern ears. Reynolds seems more focused on building textures, and the balance between voice and electronics feels right—Eclipse lacks the melodramatic whispering of The Palace; let alone the absurd guttural sounds that make Still nearly unlistenable. Although most listeners won’t immediately grasp the compositional logic used to structure Eclipse—Reynold’s liner notes can be distressingly arcane—the effect is satisfyingly visceral, and repeated listening brings out many fascinating nuances.

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Performance Notes

Part of Reynold’s “Voicespace” series, electroacoustic pieces based on literary texts, Eclipse was commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where it had its first performance in January of 1980, complete with video, slides, and film designed by Ed Emshwiller.

Première multimedia version
(with video, slides, film by Ed Emshwiller)
25 minutes
31 January 1980
First Intermedia Art Festival, Guggenheim Museum, New York
Commissioned by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Première electroacoustic version
16:48 minutes
18 February 1982
Symphony Space, New York
(Concert in honor of Ross Lee Finney)
Commissioned by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

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Liner Notes (1992 CD)

By Roger Reynolds
Roger Reynolds/Voicespace
Lovely Music, 1992

Voices, language and space…

. . . they interested me even in the early 60s when I wrote The Emperor of Ice Cream for the ONCE Festivals in Ann Arbor. Since each of us knows so much about the behavior of the voice—intimate endearments, rage at a distance—it is an ideal vehicle for auditory spatial illusions (all the more when in the service of language and its powers of invocation). In the early 70s, at the Center for Music Experiment in La Jolla, I heard daily rehearsals of the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble as they perturbed vocal norms. Evenings, I read my daughter to sleep trying to capture, for each character in the story, an individual and consistent vocal behavior. She was a demanding critic, and stimulated a good deal of nocturnal reflection about vocal identity. Electronics, at first analogue, later digital systems, offered rather precise control over auditory space (a particular sound’s size, location, distance, the character of the host space in which it was heard). I sought spare but evocative texts and tried to conjure up unfamiliar yet appropriate vocal behaviors with which to present them. The five works in the series thus far share a concern with the potential of auditory spatial imaging: this is a subject still only tentatively broached. They attempt to create a personal theater through the mind’s ear. Yet they are distinct. Three of them are presented here. (Those missing are: A Merciful Coincidence [available on an earlier Lovely Music double 33 rpm album] and number five, The Vanity of Words [which can be heard on Wergo, Volume 4 WER 2024-50 and Neuma 450-781.)

The Palace is in some regards the most straightforward of the set, although it has novel aspects. A solo performer, alternating between countertenor and dramatic baritone registers, sings to the accompaniment of his own prerecorded speaking voice. The Borges text was digitally recorded by Philip Larson; these sounds were analyzed and then processed in such a way as toemphasize their natural harmonic content and give them a supra-human scale. I took “the palace” of the poem as a metaphor for mental life itself, which, though “not infinite,” is comprised of myriad compartments, as numerous “as the grains of sand in the Ganges.” The text implied two extreme perspectives on the part of the narrating intelligence: active and reflective authority. The singer’s vocalise intimates something of the emotional impetus behind the speaker’s pronouncements, at first through a structured though indecipherable pseudo-language, gradually giving way to a more articulate song in which the final phrase is intelligible: “I know that I am not dead.” In this work, I had in mind not only the spaces that exist in the physical world, or that might be found in the ambiguities of spoken language, but those that one occasionally senses between the vitality of the message conceived in the mind and the often muted reality of the spoken words themselves.

Eclipse has an ambitious set of subjects: sun/moon, male/female. It began as a collage of text fragments from favorite authors. The hope was to induce the experience of the general from a sufficiently dense superimposition of specifics (to interweave similar and yet discrete thoughts in such a way that their parsing became too difficult, that the mind wearied and wandered, but over a foreseen terrain . . . ). Phrases were collaged often in dense juxtaposition. Their original contexts contrasted markedly, yet they could be grouped together far more easily than one would have expected. Working with a male and a female reader, I suggested for each line a particular pacing and inflection, later editing these materials into a composite that is meant to evoke a wholeness between separate components that one cannot legislate with linear arguments. Not only vocal timing, gender, attitude, and style help to differentiate the parallel messages, but independent spatial orbits as well.

Euphonious computer-synthesized sounds begin the work and enter occasionally thereafter, providing an extra-terrestrial reference. Eclipse explores textual heterophony and the subtleties of the mutual, unpredictable eclipsing of one thread of meaning by another as one’s attention (inevitably) is redirected.

Still, the earliest of the set, evolved through experiments with a variety of fanciful sonic perspectives ( . . . a soliloquy from within Lear’s mouth . . . twilight on an arid, empty, limitless plane . . . ) and with the notion of positional motives. If a series of sounds issues from a particular sequence of positions in space, one might learn, I thought, to sense a new complement to the pitch, temporal, timbral, and dynamic characteristics of a musical line—to be “moved” in an unfamiliar sense. The austere Coleridge text in slow motion across the aspirate clicks of the performer’s ingressive vocal fry. The incidental air sounds produced by this vocal technique suggested wind as a central natural reference for Still.

Voicespace exists primarily as a set of quadraphonic tape compositions. For presentation on compact disc, the rear channels were folded over into the front, placed exclusively on the right or left and reverberated slightly. The front channels were panned towards the center, their high frequencies enhanced. The resulting trapezoidal configuration distorts, but allows one to infer a sense of, the original. Multiple listenings will allow, I hope, a fuller knowledge of these works than can be had from singular concert performances even though the recorded experience has less dimensional range.

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Liner Notes (Watershed DVD)

By Roger Reynolds
Watershed
Mode, 1998

About Eclipse: Planetary Associations

Eclipse was a collaboration with film and video artist Ed Emshwiller, and raised a host of integrative considerations. It forced me to be conscious of the issues posed by intermedia efforts (as collaboration will). We began by sharing recent materials. His had grown from a video synthesis work based on a sun/moon image, on male and female faces and forms. Mine included incessantly but slowly shifting synthesized sounds and modified human voices, both the result of computer processing. The materials had in common a continuously evolving and yet suspended quality not unrelated to the archetypal sources from which they had arisen. We agreed to explore images of sun and moon with their complementary and planetary associations. I sought an appropriate text, planning to project it with a male and female voice, speaking, singing, lines, phrases that would wander orbitally across an illusory auditory space. No single textual passage I could discover seemed of the proper scope and scale, and the notion dawned that a montage of views drawn from various authors might provide a sufficiently diverse commentary on this expansive subject. Selecting, then, from Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Issa, Borges, Melville, and García Márquez, I assembled a text which fell into three sections. Its formative segments fused to a degree I still find rather surprising.

My contribution to Eclipse comprises a set of four 4-minute musical statements. These overlapped variously with four primarily visual sections. The two modalities alternatively assert themselves, only reaching a supportive simultaneity near the close of a 25-minute intermedia version. The first musical section is entirely formed out of computer synthesized sounds and computer processed voice. The other three weave together pitched materials with declamatory voices that project in contrasting densities a wide range of directed attitudes on the text: both those of the authors selected and my own modulate the text through the pacing and inflection demanded of the vocalists in the recording process, and through the editing, interweaving, and spatial disposition of the resulting lines. Because the visual and auditory episodes tend to succeed rather than to accompany one another, a considerable level of complexity in both is reasonable. Interferences proffered in one episode linger to influence the next, though the mode changes. A rather spacious pace is maintained on the level of phrase while, complementarily, the microstructure of each single event (whether word, musical tone, or image) is enriched.

The most fundamental task in the aural episodes was to achieve a simultaneous presentation of several textual threads while maintaining individual characterization and clarity. I attempted to keep the composite comprehensible through the influence of several factors:

• • the individuality of approach to a common subject inherent in the style of each author
  • the use of male or female voice
  • the imposition of a supportive attitude and pace with which each textual thread was articulated
  • spatial separation and individualized patterns of movement for each line.

In the case of the last factor, for example, all phrase events in Part I have fixed positions, but are kept spatially distinct. In Part II, source positions are more varied, though still fixed, with the exception of three periodically repeated words which move along separate paths. Part III pits a single orbit circling against an array of stationary positions which shift clockwise with each spoken phrase. The final part begins with stable but differentiated positions for each tonal element and gradually introduces three primary orbits along which multiple phrases travel simultaneously but at differing rates. At the close, there is a uniform tide of sound flowing from all speakers.

I have dwelled upon text and its presentation because of the particular integrative importance it seems to me to have in an intermodal experience. Editing the text presentation so that multiple lines could be overlaid without mutual interference—could be made, in a sense transparent to one another—was arduous but essential. The phonetic substance of the sound materials matters, and it is important that, however dense the texture, the value of the words is not compromised. In discussing synesthesia for example, Lawrence E. Marks notes that:

of all the sorts of sounds in the environment, speech sounds turn out far and away to be the most powerful stimuli in arousing visual images

Thus, I have planned a tantalizingly complex yet potentially comprehensible flood of verbal messages that serves various ends:

• • to trigger both foreseen and unexpected analogies
  • to create the demand for (and hence justify the use of) structural spatial relationships
  • to refer to the work’s archetypal originsspecifically, but at the same time to do so with such a density of overlays that specifics become, paradoxically, general
  • to tie by an insistent weaving together and mutual eclipsing: lyrical but abstract sound, wordless song, intonation, and speech, so as to invite the transcendence that cannot be commanded.

[Excerpted from Roger Reynolds: Profile of a Composer, C.F. Peters Corporation, New York, 1982 (ed. D. Gillespie), pp. 10–12.]

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Text

The following fragments form the vocal textures for Voicespace III, “Eclipse.” The corresponding authors are identified in parentheses, and consist of Jorge Luis Borges, García Márquez, Kobayashi Issa, James Joyce, Herman Melville and Wallace Stevens.

Part I

Part I has no text.

Part II

…the secret duty
to define the moon…
(Borges)

The obscure moon lighting
an obscure world of things that would
never be quite expressed…
(Stevens)

…the moon is a character created for the
complex inditing of the rare thing we all are,
multiple and unique…
(Borges)

…the Arctic moonlight seemed illusive, faint,
more mist than moon…
(Stevens)

…in the sun or the deceptive moonlight…
(Borges)

In the doubtful moon are all dreams, the unattainable,
lost time, all possibles or impossibles…
(Borges)

…sinking into the indulgences that in the moonlight
have their habitude…
(Stevens)

The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms.
(Stevens)

The moon is a quiet moon,
Nevertheless—
(Issa)

Part III

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
without evasion by a single metaphor.
(Stevens)

He conceived his voyaging to be an up and down between two elements, a fluctuating between sun and moon, a sally into gold and crimson forms.
(Stevens)

her antiquity…
(Joyce)

her luminary reflection…
(Joyce)

her constancy under all her phases,
rising and setting by her appointed times,
waxing and waning…
(Joyce)

her power to enamour, to mortify,
to invest with beauty,
to render insane…
(Joyce)

the tranquil inscrutability of her visage…
(Joyce)

her omens of tempest and of calm…
(Joyce)

the admonition of her crater,
her arid seas,
her silence…
(Joyce)

on the night the night of the quiet moon
on the night of the quiet moon he would be awakened
awakened by the fleeting train music he would be
he would be awakened by the fleeting train music of
Bruckner thunder dawns on the night of the quiet
of the quiet moon he would be awakened by the fleeting
the fleeting fleeting by the fleeting train music of
Bruckner thunder dawns that brought on ruinous flood
floods ruinous floods and left the quiet moon of the
night on the night of the quiet moon he would be
awakened by the fleeting train music of Bruckner thunder
dawns that brought on ruinous floods and left a desolation
a desolation of tattered gowns of dead brides awakened
awakened awakened by the fleeting night of the quiet
moon of the quiet night of the quiet of the quiet moon
he would be awakened on the night of the quiet moon he
would be awakened by the fleeting train music of
Bruckner thunder dawns that brought on ruinous floods
and left a desolation of tattered gowns of dead brides
on the branches of the almond trees on the branches
that brought on ruinous ruinous floods that brought on
ruinous floods and left a desolation and left floods
and left and left ruinous floods and left floods and
left and left and left floods and left a desolation
a desolation of tattered gowns of dead brides on the
branches of the almond trees of the quiet moon of the
night of the quiet night of the night of the night on
the night of the quiet moon he would be awakened by
the fleeting train music of Bruckner thunder dawns
that brought on ruinous floods and left a desolation
of tattered gowns of dead brides on the branches of
the almond trees at the former Dutch lunatic asylum…
(García Márquez)

Part IV

…a total eclipse of the sun…
(Stevens)

It was such a true night in the
middle of the day that the stars
lit up, flowers closed, hens went
to roost, and animals sought
shelter with their best premonitory
instincts…
(García Márquez)

Why did the absence of light disturb
him less than the presence of noise?
(Joyce)

…and as the ephemeral night
broke up, the light of truth grew
brighter…
(García Márquez)

…like the true light of the
truest sun…
(Stevens)

After the final no
there comes a yes.
(Stevens)

No was the night.
Yes is the present sun.
(Stevens)

…condemned us to live facing
this limitless plain of harsh lunar
dust where the bottomless sunsets
pain us in our souls…
(García Márquez)

…On land, meridional,
a bispherical moon, revealed in
imperfect varying phases of
lamination through the posterior
interstice of the imperfectly
occluded skirt of a carnose negligent
perambulating female…
(Joyce)

Because of the surety of the sense
of touch in his firm full masculine
feminine passive active hand.
(Joyce)

The sorrows of sun, too, gone…
the moon and moon, the yellow moon
of words about the nightingale in
measureless measures.
(Stevens)

…whose sinking is the
intelligence of our sleep…
(Stevens)

…lost forever in the enigma
of the eclipse…
(García Márquez)

…the sun hides not…
the millions of miles of deserts and
of griefs beneath the moon…
(Melville)

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Recordings

Roger Reynolds: Voicespace III, “Eclipse” (1978–1980)
LP: Roger Reynolds/Voicespace. Lovely Music VR 1801-2 (1982)
CD: Roger Reynolds/Voicespace. Lovely Music LCD 1801 (1992)
Purchase: CD [Amazon | Lovely Records]
Online: YouTube

Track Listing
1. The Palace (Voicespace IV)
2. Eclipse (Voicespace III)
3. Still (Voicespace I)

Originally pressed to vinyl in 1982, the audio-only version of Eclipse as issued a decade later on compact disc. The album includes another Reynold’s Borges-inspired composition, The Palace.

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Roger Reynolds: Voicespace III, “Eclipse” (1978–1980)
DVD: Watershed. Mode 70 (1998)
Purchase: DVD [Mode]

Track Listing
1. Watershed IV
2. Eclipse
3. The Red Act Arias

Eclipse is also available on the Watershed DVD, available through Mode records. Mixed for 5.1 surround sound, Watershed contains Reynolds’ Watershed IV, Red Act Arias, and the multimedia version of Eclipse. Obvious this version of Eclipse has a fuller sound than available on the stereo CD, and it’s nice to have Emshwiller’s visuals as well!

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Additional Information

Roger Reynolds Homepage
Roger Reynolds maintains comprehensive web site.

Lovely Records Voicespace Page
Lovely Records has a small page featuring the Voicespace CD.

Voicespace Liner Notes
The complete liner notes for Voicespace are available at Lovely Music.

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Roger Reynolds Borges-Related Works

Roger Reynolds Main Page
Return to the Garden of Forking Path’s Roger Reynolds profile.

Compass (1973)
For tenor, bass, cello, and double-bass, this is a setting of the poem “Compass,” from El otro, el mismo.

Voicespace IV, “The Palace” (1980)
For voice and pre-recorded materials; a “setting” of the poem “The Palace” from El oro de los tigres.

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Author: Allen B. Ruch
Image Credit: The photograph of Roger Reynolds was borrowed from his homepage, and was taken in 1966.
Last Modified: 30 August 2024
Borges Music Page: Borges Music
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com