Negative Space
Sunday, June 15; 2:00PM
Ty Bouque
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The most fundamental principle of design and form: an attention not to what is there but to what is not. Music is often colloquially understood (though there’s something much deeper behind the impulse) as an art of density: phrases like pitch space indicate a loose acoustic architecture, while textural thickness or harmonic richness signify gradations of saturation. And silence, of course—Cage proposed it most succinctly—is the absence that gives access to such a presence as constitutively identifiable at all: the empty space at the beginning and end and in-between movements of the work are as much a part of the music as the notes. But this afternoon we’re listening not to silence, but to absence or emptiness from within the notes themselves. Think of the music like a series of large rooms and hallways: while we could certainly marvel at the intricacies of their layout, at their ornamental sconces and odd nooks and curious choices of material, we’d be better off to listen for the empty space which the notes carve out: all the empty space these rooms so elegantly enclose.
Hannah Kendall, who this week serves as the festival’s Composer in Residence, has relied on that oldest of modern techniques, the twelve-tone row, to generate the scaffold of Vera’s pitch world: in other words, there’s a compositional apparatus governing which notes get used in which order. But the result is hardly so calculatedly cryptic: with the row as base material, the form of this quartet relies on a gradual process of removal and reintroduction that could not be clearer. At the start, one hears only the “white notes” (as on the piano), maintaining the row’s original order but leaving out all the interceding “black notes.” (Yesterday, we heard about Kendall’s engagement with Basquiat, and in particular in a work which inverted that artist’s usual arrangement of black-on-white, attending to his color schemes as symbolic of racial relations: color symbolism plays a likewise role in Kendall’s imagination.) As the missing notes are introduced, the texture appears to slack, weighted down by new impasses and harmonic thicknesses that recolor how we hear the opening. One by one, those missing pitches are removed again, but now we can no longer
hear the plain “white” material as whole: something from the middle has been taken away, leaving a shadowy void behind it. (N.B. In classical painting, negative space is also referred to as white space.)
Ravel, meanwhile, is often cited as the master orchestrator, with a hand for textural magic tricks that never come at the expense of clarity. The same is no less true in the Piano Trio: one can hear, in the armory of drastic color choices, an orchestral composer’s sensibility.
The secret—if there can be said to be one—to Ravel’s hand is in the maintenance of distance. Think back—though Ravel would hate us doing so, its success was his biggest regret—to the first two solos at the opening of Bolero. The low flute against the snare is practically a hollow mold, the strings almost nothing in their plucking beneath it. The clarinet picks up in the identical register of the flute, only the strings have risen to fill a small portion of the space around the solo, slowly but surely fleshing the harmony, slightly higher, slightly closer. It is the same thing again, only marginally more sketched, but already we can hear the trajectory beginning to erect its journey towards the inevitable crash. All it took was a small change in space between.
So too in the trio. The opening octaves between strings hold something like austerity in place, though later they’ll chase each other at the tail. The piano starts mid-register and close at hand, but by the third movement is so far in the basement that it rumbles rather than rings. Overwhelmingly, the voicing Ravel will prefer by default puts the strings at outer limits and the piano somewhere filling out the middle—an ecstasy of independence and architectural care—but then all three will enter the same room (as in the screaming trills at the work’s end) and the ecstasy ramps up. But in any of the infinite gauzy colors we hear across the work, what is actually being heard is an extreme attention to empty space.
(Another story goes that Ravel, in preparing sketches for the trio, quipped: “My Trio is finished. I only need the themes for it.” The harmonic progression and formal designs—pulled from an uncanny mixture of personal sensibility and inherited models for a classic instrumentation—were built in advance. Which is to say that the “negative space” of abstract harmony was conceived of first: the music came later, drawn thin around the empty air while leaving it untouched.)
And Michi Wiancko’s Fantasia for Tomorrow encodes its empty space right there in the title. Tomorrow is always an unknown quantity, a void around which we decorate today in hopes that it arrives with something like beauty. This work, then, might be read as a fantasia for what is here only as a kernel, what will soon be but is not yet. Where Ravel and Kendall both rely on strictly musical parameters in the articulation of negative space, Wiancko’s is more abstract and contemplative. This music—in its deep reliance on connection between players and shared command of musical time (it was written in
homage to Wiancko’s mother, a violinist and violist and her earliest duo partner)—holds open a space for the unspoken and the hopeful, a beam of white light around which this ever-changing material congeals.
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This afternoon, music itself is after what Jankélévitch called the ineffable, an articulation of something that is not there and cannot be named. All we can do is dance around it, which is, after all, what architecture is: a dance at the peripheries of nothing.