Borges Music – Reynolds: Voicespace IV, “The Palace”
- At September 30, 2018
- By Great Quail
- In Borges
0
Roger Reynolds: Voicespace IV, “The Palace”
(1978–1980)
Length: 16:14 min.
For bass-baritone, quadraphonic computer processed sound, and modest staging.
Text: “The Palace” by Jorge Luis Borges.
Processing: Roger Reynolds.
Voice: Philip Larson.
Like all Reynold’s “Voicespace” pieces, The Palace is a work which blurs the boundaries between poetry, music, and ritual. It is structured around a mannered reading of Borges’ prose-poem “The Palace,” the speaker’s voice enhanced by electronic effects and accompanied by subtle drones. Over this reading, a bass-baritone sings in an invented “pseudo-language,” alternating unpredictably between a rolling baritone and an agitated countertenor. The combination makes for an intriguing but unsettling sixteen minutes; a 3 a.m. introspection on the apprehensive borderlands between insomnia and nightmare.
Philip Larson begins the poem with a ponderous slowness, his baritone drenched in reverb and haloed by a metallic ring. The poem’s serial commas are replaced by periods, a dramatic pause separating each item in the ritualistic enumeration of objects composing the palace: “The walls. The ramparts. The gardens. The labyrinths…” Halfway through the recitation, the speaker breaks the poem’s cadence to whisper lines from the second stanza: “We can take in some faces, some voices, some words…” His voice drawn to a thin, tremulous whisper, the intrusion fades before Borges’ repetition of the word “feeble.” As the poem resumes its natural course, the singing becomes increasingly more prominent, the warbling baritone entering a duet with its electronically-enhanced twin. The speaker ends the first stanza, but the unearthly vocalise continues, bridging the wordless void between the poem’s halves.
As the speaker recommences his reading, his voice becomes increasingly distorted, occasionally mimicking old age or dropping to a whisper. Glassy electronics underline the chilling lines about death, which are delivered in a voice not unlike some undead cryptkeeper. The Palace concludes when the speaker returns to the opening lines, repeating the list over and over again, each cycle winding tighter and faster in a frantic muttering of syllables. Borges’ final line is delivered in a stentorian baritone limned with an ironic, sepulchral echo: “I know that I am not dead.”
The Palace is unapologetically experimental music, and shares similarities with the early electroacoustical vocal manipulations of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music, and avant-garde pop albums such as Björk’s Medúlla. Like most music of this kind, The Palace alternates between profundity and silliness, and falls under the category of “It’s the kind of think you’ll like if you like this kind of thing.” Nevertheless, The Palace has a fine sense of theatrics, and a nervous claustrophobia stalks its haunted shadows and funhouse reflections.
Performance Notes
Part of Roger Reynold’s “Voicespace” series, electroacoustical pieces based on literary texts, The Palace adapts a “prose-poem” from Borges’ 1972 collection, El oro de los tigres (“The Gold of the Tigers”).
Première
First performance: 28 February 1981
Contemporary Music Festival 1981, CalArts, Los Angeles
Philip Larson, Bass-Baritone
National Endowment for the Arts Award
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.
Text
The Palace
By Jorge Luis Borges
The Palace is not infinite.
The walls, the ramparts, the gardens, the labyrinths, the staircases, the terraces, the parapets, the doors, the galleries, the circular or rectangular patios, the cloisters, the intersections, the cisterns, the anterooms, the chambers, the alcoves, the libraries, the attics, the dungeons, the sealed cells and the vaults, are not less in quantity than the grains of sand in the Ganges, but their number has a limit. From the roofs, toward sunset, many people can make out the forges, the workshops, the stables, the boatyards and the huts of the slaves.
It is granted to no one to traverse more than an infinitesimal part of the palace. Some know only the cellars. We can take in some faces, some voices, some words, but what we perceive is of the feeblest. Feeble and precious at the same time. The date which the chisel engraves in the tablet, and which is recorded in the parochial registers, is later than our own death; we are already dead when nothing touches us, neither a word nor a yearning nor a memory. I know that I am not dead.
—Translation by Alastair Reid
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, Roger Reynolds/Voicespace was as issued a decade later on compact disc. The album includes another Reynold’s Borges-inspired composition, Eclipse.
Additional Information
Additional InformationRoger 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.
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 III, “Eclipse” (1979)
For voice and tape, with texts by Borges, Joyce, García Márquez, Issa, Melville, and Stevens.
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
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Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com