Pynchon Music: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf

this will end when the last listener leaves the building

Out in a bloody rain to feed our fields
Amid the Maenad roar of nitre’s song
And sulfur’s cantus firmus.
—Richard Wharfinger, “The Courier’s Tragedy”

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (b. 1962)

Pynchon Connection

Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf has described Thomas Pynchon as “one of the most important novelists of our time.” Pynchon’s second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, inspired Mahnkopf to write four individual pieces and a variation. It began in 2001 with The Tristero System, a musical homage to Pynchon’s underground postal network. This was followed by The Courier’s Tragedy, a twenty-minute cello piece derived from the novel’s “ill, ill Jacobean revenge play,” an insane piece of seventeenth-century Grand Guignol written by one “Richard Wharfinger.” Next was W.A.S.T.E., for solo oboe and live electronics, followed by D.E.A.T.H, an electronic meditation composed of work from the previous pieces. There was also W.A.S.T.E. 2, a simplified version of W.A.S.T.E.

In 2005 Mahnkopf combined these pieces into a theatrical work entitled Hommage à Thomas Pynchon. Designed in part to “defeat” and “exhaust” its performers, the work is also intended to disorient the audience by confusing the compartmentalized roles of a theater’s internal spaces. Upon leaving their seats, the audience finds the theater’s lobby has been wired for sound, with electronics continuing the performance ad infinitum. Indeed, Mahnkopf has suggested that the only way to conclude the performance is to become locked outside the building!

Although Hommage à Thomas Pynchon is designed to be experienced live, Mahnkopf has recorded the four principal Lot 49 pieces under the title Pynchon-Zyklus, or Pynchon Cycle. Lasting nearly 70 minutes, the Pynchon Cycle is the first CD in Neos’ “Mahnkopf Edition” series, and represents the most accessible way to enjoy—if that’s the right word?—the composer’s tribute to his fellow “paranoid.”

Review of Pynchon Cycle

First things first: Pynchon Cycle is not for the faint-hearted. Mahnkopf belongs to the spiky, dissonant, relentlessly atonal school of modern music—think of Harrison Birtwistle, or early Peter Maxwell Davies. The kind of music that earns furious applause from guys wearing Frank Zappa T-shirts underneath their black turtlenecks; but drives season-ticket holders to the exits muttering in disgust. Mahnkopf’s stated intention with Pynchon Cycle is to create something “hard, almost brutal, with the logical consequentiality of ultimately senseless procedures which appear to mediate everything with everything else,” using music “consciously acknowledged as hideous,” and expressing a sense of “paranoid meaninglessness.”

The Cycle kicks off with The Tristero System, scored for two pianos, two bass clarinets, three trombones, four piccolos, and two percussionists. Seventeen minutes of “sufficiently repellent post-urban sonic material,” the piece pits the instruments against each other in a cacophony of dissonant voices. We begin with a piano, its lower keys stroked and pounded in frustration, a furious and futile mining for a rhythmic figure that never quite appears. Shrill woodwinds are bullied aside by guttural brass, blaring and squonking like a band of fascist geese. The addition of frenzied percussion brings everything to a boiling point. A sustained, undulating drone on the brass attempts to impose order, but the orchestra resists, erupting into whirling pockets of resistance. The dialogue between the trombones and piccolos intensifies; but we’ve yet to hear from the star of the piece: the timpani. Some nine minutes into The Tristero System, the drums begin a furious, idiot pounding. This isn’t Beethoven’s “fate” knocking on the door, this is the 3:00 a.m. secret police, and they’re not happy.

This knocking is the only real anchor in the piece—it can hardly be called a “theme”—and it appears a few more times; here reduced to a restrained rapping, there threatening to hammer the door to splinters. In between these aggressive punctuations, the instruments continues to bicker, and Mahnkopf’s orchestrations remain remarkably colorful throughout—there’s some wondrously strange effects some thirteen minutes in that defy description, and it sounds like a kitchen’s being demolished somewhere near the 16:30 mark. There’s no real conclusion to The Tristero System: the piece ends when it ends; perhaps evoking the feeling of being locked outside the building? Or like a passing storm, the whirling tempest has merely traveled somewhere else?

After a few seconds of welcome silence we’re onto The Courier’s Tragedy, scored for solo cello. Or it’s more accurate to say it’s scored twelve times for solo cello: the player is offered a dozen different notation systems, some of which are mutually exclusive. He’s expected to navigate this compositional labyrinth to some form of exit, usually by surrendering to despair. The piece is named after the fictional “Jacobean revenge play” described at length in The Crying of Lot 49, and is designed to follow its five-act structure and numerous violent incidents. Mahnkopf subjected this “play-within-a-play” to an algorithm that converted Pynchon’s text into “numbers and proportions,” and the score was based on this transformed cipher. Sort of pseudo-random aleatory music; and that’s not a bad description: The Courier’s Tragedy is twenty minutes of buzzsaw notes, scraping noises, and manic pizzicato. Despite being organized around a coded structure—which Mahnkopf himself calls “senseless,” and likens to “inhuman machinery”—the piece sounds like unbridled chaos, like a giant space mantis found a cello and said, “I can mate with this!”

The only segment that makes any “sense” occurs fourteen minutes in, when the cellist begins plucking the strings aggressively and repeatedly. This return of Tristero’s hammering lasts a full sixty seconds, but now suggests slashing rather than knocking—the “refreshingly simple mass stabbing” of Pynchon’s Ercole by way of Bernard Herrmann? (According to Mahnkopf, this section of “simple stupidity” is “the Lost Guard of Faggio, the corpses of whose 50 members are found in a lake.”) After this moment of “order” crumbles, we’re back to the sound of a cello being systematically deconstructed. The cellist’s fumbling becomes increasingly audible, until all that remains is an exhausted tapping on the wooden body of the cello, “the shortest line ever written in blank verse: T-t-t-t-…”

“Possibilities for paranoia become abundant.”

An oboe comes screaming across the sky, and we begin Part 3, W.A.S.T.E. The harshest piece in the Cycle, W.A.S.T.E. uses live electronics to amplify and distort a solo oboe. While W.A.S.T.E. features all the sounds you expect from European avant-garde electronics—hissing bursts of static, blurting bubbles, spacey drones—it’s the oboe that quickly induces a migraine. Pushed to its highest register, the shrill woodwind becomes a creature that just won’t die, its tortured shrieking mocked by the chilly electronics. The end comes eighteen minutes and thirteen seconds into the piece, which is eighteen minutes and twelve seconds too late. Of course, Mahnkopf intends W.A.S.T.E. to sound “brutal,” “ugly,” and “insufferable,” but this borders on the comically unlistenable—a classical version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.

Although described as the third part of the Cycle in Mahnkopf’s liner notes, D.E.A.T.H. is the fourth and final track on the Neos CD. A twelve-minute electronic drone, D.E.A.T.H. shares many similarities with the work of Stockhausen, the electronics composer mentioned by name in Lot 49. Unlike its predecessor W.A.S.T.E., D.E.A.T.H. doesn’t overstay its welcome; but contains a metallic bitterness that prevents it from being mistaken as ambient music. Its spacey texture is occasionally wrinkled by small moments of acoustic intrigue—a lisping snippet of backmasking, a glassy chorus of electrons, the brush of something large stumbling in the dark. According to Mahnkopf, the electronic manipulations of D.E.A.T.H. represent the “final decomposed state” of material used earlier in the Pynchon Cycle. Serving as a kind of acoustic heat death to the Cycle, the piece calls to mind another of Pynchon’s favorite themes—entropy.

While the music of the Pynchon Cycle is unapologetically abrasive, the CD is impeccably performed, recorded, and produced. This is especially evident in The Tristero System, which has the most challenging dynamics and orchestrations of the Cycle. Every instrument is distinct and well-spatialized, which makes the piece surprisingly intelligible for being so cluttered. The liner notes are satisfyingly detailed, and are available as a PDF with the Presto Music digital download.

Mahnkopf’s Notes

Albums

Additional Information

Pynchon on Record
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