Intro | The Text | Reading Rilke as Music | Interaction | Reading Rilke as Performer

The Composer’s Voice: Reading Rilke as Music

The complex logic of Rilke's self-reflexive text naturally became an important framework for the composition, both from a musical and technical standpoint. While I had already composed interactive works based around a text (for example, my Continuities for glove controller), I had never before used a text that demanded such a dramatic reading. In "Continuities," a tiny poem by Archie Ammons functioned, so to speak, as a pretext for composition, a quantity of musical material culled for its sonic potential rather than its poetry. While essential to the piece at one level, the poem as poem was also, in some respects, left behind. In approaching Rilke, however, I wanted above all to leave the prose intact. Because the dramatic logic of the text—with its unexpected twists and sudden changes of affect—was essential to the moment of insight it described, I needed to find a way to make the text audible throughout the composition, to make it comprehensible for the audience. I needed, in short, to develop an approach to the electronics that would not only allow the words to “speak,” but would also draw out their dramatic impact. The problem became one of balancing a desire to preserve the clarity of Rilke’s drama, with its flash of insight, against technology's inherent tendency to obscure. Achieving this balance was a long process of trial and error, which perhaps explains why the work took nearly two years to complete.

Thus, the text came first. Moreover, the very first words took on a kind of primary importance: the opening, rhetorical question, "Habe ich es schon gesagt? (Have I said it before?), and its equivocal answer, "Ich lerne sehen." (I'm learning to see). This pair of statements, with their suggestion of possibly failed memory and perception, became a driving force behind the composition. The most obvious manifestation occurs at the level of form. The announcement "Ich lerne sehen" recurs as a series of refrains that progress over the course of the drama, to reflect the psychological development of the first person. The voice that, at the end of the piece, reaches out to the audience in a naked cry of pain reveals the depth of this sentimental education. It is, in short, a far cry from the profound and measured resignation of the chant that opens the piece. The enormous distance between the two refrains thus raises a question: who is the wiser self? The "ich" of the beginning or that of the end?

That question ultimately speaks to a deeper level of the composition, for the overall trajectory of the piece can be seen, in a sense, to move forwards and backwards at the same time. Just as the subject’s moment of insight depends on an act of reflection that escapes the forward momentum of the narrative retelling, the score includes a number of musical fragments, gestures, timbres that, obscurely foreshadowed early in the piece, resonate more fully later on. For example, a phrase within the electronic prelude foretells the final, climactic vocal cadence. Or, at a much closer interval, voice and electronics express the horrific realization, "Mir graute ein Gesicht von innen zu sehen" (It disgusted me to see a face from the inside), as if in instant replay. This kind of foreshadowing/backshadowing also crosses languages. When the singer utters in English, "she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands," it is just moments after a premonition of the same line has been heard, in the electronic score, auf Deutsch. By the end of the piece, the listener will have experienced its main ideas in both directions, in German and in English, on several different but simultaneous musical and psychological levels. The musical logic that motivates Vis-à-vis could thus be described as a kind of complex mobius strip. (next page)