5112c0509b0f2c9de72ee0b84cd6ddaa MD5

mir nichts, dir nichts

for small ensemble

dur. ca. 9'

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.