Dyads, Triads

Where is the divid­ing line between me and you? Where do we end and the world begins?

Our skin would seem to be an obvi­ous first answer. The mind, the sup­posed locus of our sense of self, evolved at first to take stock of our bod­i­ly land­scape, of which it is an inte­gral part, posits António Damá­sio. The skin, then, by bind­ing togeth­er all the fea­tures of that land­scape, emerges as a fair­ly evi­dent bor­der. I sit on the inside, sep­a­rat­ed from what’s outside.

And yet, there was a time before that bor­der. «Infants begin to see by notic­ing the edges of things», writes Anne Car­son in her essay Eros, the bit­ter­sweet. As chil­dren, we grad­u­al­ly learn that we are sep­a­rate from the peo­ple and objects around us. And so, before erect­ing the walls demar­cat­ing our own self, there is a time in which we are bound­less. A frag­ment of that bound­less­ness remains with us there­after. We end up always occu­py­ing some por­tion of space beyond ourselves. We stake a claim to the space imme­di­ate­ly around us for our ​“per­son­al bub­ble”: our periper­son­al space.

This periper­son­al space is the region around a per­son­’s body — peri com­ing from the Greek: around, about. Like our skin, it medi­ates the bor­der between inside and out­side. Like our skin, we tend to mind dear­ly who, and how, and where we allow con­tact. Unlike the skin, how­ev­er, this edge is fuzzy: one that expands and con­tracts as if it were a lung. (Indeed some touch­es — those capa­ble of mak­ing this space con­tract so as to allow skin to brush skin — are known to quite often affect one’s breath­ing.) It is part of the same feed­back loop between body and mind through which we think, feel, mod­u­late our emo­tion­al state, or let our­selves be mod­u­lat­ed by it. It is ver­i­ta­bly ours — it is ver­i­ta­bly us. What is at a dis­tance may be in fact already touch­ing us. An object is either safe­ly far­ther away than the reach of our glance, or it is already close enough to trig­ger one’s fight-or-fight response. That is why ​“need­ing space” dur­ing times of duress is more than metaphor­ic fan­cy, and why close­ness requires trust. Like our skin, the periper­son­al space bears the scars of what – and whom – we have encountered. 

Touch­ing with­out touch­ing. Bound­less­ness with­in bounds. Though seem­ing­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry, these ten­sions are in fact part of the geistiger sub­strate that even­tu­al­ly pro­duces a (lin­guis­tic) I from a bare sense of Self. They are also part of a num­ber of events that make up the rit­u­als of seduc­tion, if not the cre­ation of the mixed reper­toire that sus­tains any type of inti­ma­cy besides the roman­tic: incom­plete­ness and ambi­gu­i­ty, desire along­side real­i­ty, pain min­gling with pleasure. 

On that note, it is also sig­nif­i­cant to remark that a mech­a­nism that evolved (like so many oth­ers) in order to main­tain the integri­ty of an organ­ism plays nowa­days such a big part in its undo­ing. This func­tion­al change can per­haps be described as an exap­ta­tion. While an adap­ta­tion con­sists of a whol­ly new trait that came to per­sist, owe­ing to the way it improved an organ­is­m’s fit­ness, an exap­ta­tion is a retool­ing of exist­ing struc­tures for new pur­pos­es. With this kind of ​“impro­vi­sa­tion”, how­ev­er, comes an increase in com­plex­i­ty, an unwield­i­ness in con­scious con­trol, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty for con­fu­sion: the basic mech­a­nisms of desire.

It is on these mech­a­nisms that I tried to ground Dyads, Tri­ads. Two fig­ur­al lines of force per­vade the piece, flow­ing in oppo­site direc­tions. The first ques­tions the thick iden­ti­ties of both instru­ments, pro­gres­sive­ly mak­ing them more and more flex­i­ble: the sta­bil­i­ty of the vibra­phone regard­ing pitch is bent out of shape, while the use of mul­ti­phon­ics splits the sax­o­phone into some­thing of a har­mon­ic instru­ment. The same mate­r­i­al prop­er­ties of the instru­ments that once sup­port­ed the so-called ​“con­ven­tion­al” styles of play­ing are here exploit­ed, their per­cep­tu­al and semi­otic givens twist­ed into some­thing more ambigu­ous. All the while, a sec­ond oppos­ing force brings them clos­er togeth­er. Still on the top­ic of pitch, both are brought clos­er togeth­er when made to step into the same (in)harmonic pitch space in the inter­stices of equal tem­pera­ment. Per­tain­ing ges­ture, the unam­bigu­ous­ly idiomat­ic vocab­u­lary they start with is through­out the piece pro­gres­sive­ly inter­po­lat­ed, entan­gled, imi­tat­ed, fur­ther blur­ring one and the oth­er’s ​“iden­ti­ty”. Still, this process is not with­out its resis­tance, as, the clos­er one instru­ment gets to the oth­er, the more extreme­ly the oth­er reacts — what is at a dis­tance may be in fact already touch­ing us.

Impelling these mech­a­nisms is a fair­ly thorny and stub­born met­ric cycle, that looks over and con­trols the play­ers’ somat­ic impuls­es. Although seem­ing­ly indif­fer­ent to the needs of their sur­face actions (and to the ges­tures its pres­sures end up mold­ing into exis­tence), this met­ric orga­ni­za­tion stems in fact from the very same econ­o­my of impuls­es that shapes the rest of the piece. Still, its stark con­trast to the utter­ances of the duo is essen­tial (in dri­ving home the by-now grat­ing metaphor, if noth­ing else): by com­mand­ing the self to sac­ri­fice or sur­ren­der its usu­al mech­a­nisms of self-con­trol, and by artic­u­lat­ing a con­flict between the indi­vid­ual and some­thing beyond itself, the forces of desire are restruc­tured, and a cer­tain kind of pathos finds itself again capa­ble of pro­vid­ing some sort of exis­ten­tial clarity.

In the end, how­ev­er, this met­ric cycle col­laps­es in on itself. The play­ers, now free of its yoke, hud­dle strange­ly togeth­er, pressed by the still-act­ing con­tra­dic­to­ry lines of force. This com­ing togeth­er goes as far as con­tract­ing their pres­ences onto the same staff in the score, where, now bare of the under­ly­ing pulse, one observes how the same basic dri­ve yields such dis­parate results in dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als when point­ed sole­ly at one­self and not the oth­er. The nota­tion — that before did what Alter­i­ty does, which is alter — atro­phies into the task of tak­ing account of abstract rela­tion­ships between musi­cal mate­r­i­al, not unlike Stock­hausen’s schemat­ic pieces of intu­itive music. How­ev­er, where­as Stock­hausen could sim­ply com­mand play­ers to quote from ear­li­er mate­r­i­al of his (as is the case in Prozes­sion) — also point­ing towards what still strived at the time to be a more or less a com­mon lan­guage for con­tem­po­rane­ity —, the duo per­form­ing Dyads, Tri­ads will have to trust the mixed reper­toire they them­selves built up to that moment. (Per­haps of some rel­e­vance here is also the fact that I don’t have the lux­u­ry of being Karl­heinz Stockhausen.)

I’d also like to thank Philippe Tro­vão and Yongyun Zhang, both of whom I’m owing solo pieces to.