
mir nichts, dir nichts
for small ensemble
Commissioned by Arte no Tempo, for ars ad hoc
Premiered February 9, 2025
Museu Serralves, Porto
ars ad hoc
This piece is about a complicated relationship with stillness.
We have inherited from Benjamin and Adorno a tendency to think of standstill or stasis (especially in the work of art) as resistant or utopian: holding off the catastrophe of progress. In that context, stasis can stand for two moments: either reification (the commodified negation of process and relation) or its critical interruption.
That position can no longer be easily maintained, now that the two moments can no longer alternate: the temporality of capitalism as an economic system can no longer be reduced to that of the interaction of ever-expanding capital with the commodity form. There can no longer be a “stasis of the new” (the repetition of the mere appearance of novelty, now abandoned and even passé) or a “stasis of the thing” if value is increasingly abstracted away from things, and where even commodified art — which, until recently, was doubly valuable in late capitalism for its ability to produce temporal difference in the field of culture — is being drained of its exchange value.
In any case, there is a broad movement away from the legibility of the effects from an art embodied in a determinate set of historical relations and towards the pure affect associated with experience of standstill itself, as both indie bedroom music production and major institutional players are displaced by the “lo-fi beats girl” and AI-generated artists.
So when can stasis be a critical position today?
If mimesis is a key mechanism in musical representation, stasis — the suppression of change — should elicit from the body a heightened sense of its current state and boundaries. Stillness beyond the natural rhythms of one’s body, then, elicits deliberate action, physical effort and intentionality to maintain it; otherwise, that feeling of body either dissolves or is placed in tension. In any case, the situation foregrounds our (our body’s) relationship to context: as Mariusz Kozak declared in his landmark Enacting Musical Time, “[s]tandstill projects outward toward the space that the body occupies.”
In the past, I’ve often made use of electronics for this purpose, as they seemed better poised — given the ease with which one can engender all sorts of timescales — to convey that movement to listeners; the closest I’ve been to this in my instrumental music being perhaps the focused, breath-centered gesturality of Wolf Town.
This piece is not quite an answer that question, and it is certainly not about stillness, per se — the kind of weak definition of stasis that made its way to descriptions of musical texture —, but rather a series of syntactical dead ends: variations and stubbornly literal repetitions, whose meaning shifts by the shifting of its surroundings, stuck articulating limited pitch relations. It’s an expression of anxiety — a language “polarized into its extremes”, “into gestures of shock” or the “brittle immobility of a person paralyzed”, like Adorno’s reading of Schoenberg’s Erwartung — localized not in time, but in place: a collapse of this opposition (also often present in my music) not into syntactic opposition but as a gesture’s (any gesture’s) organizing principle.
This apparent rigidity in form, like Deleuze’s Bacon’s witness, allows us as listeners to experience the forces successively applied to the musical material. The ancient Greek word stasis, after all, at first simply referred to the erection of a statue or stone pillar, and only afterwards came to mean, by metaphoric extension, posture and “the place in which one stands or should stand” — a particularly rigid position before wavering moral, social or political compasses. Only later did its meaning degrade to “equilibrium”, when not in fact “stagnation” and then “end”. Thus, rather than stillness, the resulting texture is a stasis continually undercut by unstable temporal structures (metric and rhythmic). Adorno argued the superficial frenzy of contemporary culture repressed duration. Here, it is duration itself animating these sounds — and this body waits for the end of its stillness, which can always come mir nichts, dir nichts.