Pretty Horses:
On Stark’s Foreword
Christopher Stark’s Foreword, written in 2017 for Ryan McCullough and me, opens with a series of rapidly alternating clusters in the top register of the two pianos, muted with heavy beanbags on the strings to produce a pitchless “click-clack” texture.
Ever since the first rehearsals, this opening has conjured up two distinct snippets of imagined film:
➊ A shot of Oxfords, high heels, and other forms of business footwear crisscrossing a sidewalk on a rainy morning in the city. Later on, in footage not shown, perhaps I learn the normalcy of this is disrupted by planes crashing into the World Trade Towers.
➋ A cavalcade, in the purest etymological sense. Behind them is Mazeppa, the hero of Ukrainian lore who is tied to a galloping horse as punishment for his misdeeds with a Polish countess.
I could explain the first snippet. Often, I interpret daily anonymity as an occasion for disruption (childhood expectations of an impending tempest of when all was well?). But why the second reel? Why Mazeppa? In no way is this related to Mazeppa as Liszt transcribed it—the heroism is nowhere to be found here. Moreover, the equine have been, to this day, nothing but equanimous to me.
This thought reoccurred when I recently sat through, in a state of mild ecstasy and ennui, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 film Andrei Rublëv, about the legendary Icon painter whose faith is tested amidst the terrors of body and spirit in medieval Russia. In the sixth chapter, a group of Tatars rapes and pillages the town of Vladimir, and the Bishop’s messenger, refusing to reveal the location of the city’s lot of gold, sustains all brands of torture. This includes a scene in which his mouth is filled with metal melted from a crucifix and he is tied to a horse and dragged away, writhing and screaming.
Stark’s opening gambits often break down. They so do flamboyantly and terribly. In both Foreword and Two-Handed Storytelling, a piece written for me in 2012 for piano and pre-recorded sounds, this occurs as a cataclysm of overlapping cascades. Stark has described this moment in Foreword as “shifting tectonic plates” and “glaciers falling.” (His preoccupation with environmental subjects has directly fed into other recent works, including his cello-percussion duo The Language of Landscapes.) The gestures he uses at these crucial moments are uniformly large. They are something concentric, akin to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life (a film I love two-thirds of), or Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (a film I love all of): somehow horses and humans give way to colossal nature.
In both piano works, what follows the breakdown is utopia. It was over some deli sandwiches at two in the morning that Stark recently asked, rhetorically, and not disingenuously: “isn’t music supposed to be about emotions?” I have thought, ever since knowing Two-Handed Storytelling, that his works often possess an emotional core at their formal centers. The artifice of virtuosity, both on display by the composer and on offer for the performer in the opening section, is shorn away. The exoskeleton shed, there remains a kind of disastrous idealism; something drastic must occur so that we may start again.
It is owing to a strange discomfort that utopia is, as the Greek tells us, a “non-place.” Call this Ginnungagap, or Chaos, or whatever your favorite tradition beckons. Cosmogonical label notwithstanding, something new inevitably sprouts here: a harmonic or motivic germ that allows its origins to be fully displayed before us. The germ grows perfectly; it rarely attempts something untoward. This, if we reflect upon it, implies that it grows un-organically. It is the source of its prettiness; this inorganicity is a hint something is amiss.
The second hint is the ever increasing presence of the electronics, which not only defines the not-ness of this place, but also becomes the source of dramatic tension for the live performer. The electronic processing begins to overwhelm the texture and eventually bears the bulk of the sound mass by the section’s end. Yet, rather than overtaking the acoustic sounds, it creates something protective; it envelops the sounds, sheltering and enwombing them. At those climactic junctures, the live piano is hardly noticeable at all. In two senses, the electronics sustain the piano, whose characteristic sound is, in puris naturalibus, simply that of dying. The electronics, which nearly always start out typecast in the role of antagony, become that on which we depend for our continued existence. Here, because they process live sounds, some relief is tendered from the awkwardness we feel doing nothing on stage for multiple seconds at a time. At least what the re-synthesis is adulterating came from us.
I had, in both jest and earnestness, likened the central section of Foreword to Cool Ranch flavor-blasted snacks, in a container wrapped with that, I’m sure, trademarked blue label. (N.B. it turns out Cool Ranch is registered too.) Then I read the following from Teju Cole, in an essay on the photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov, whose work has become naturalized on Instagram:
“Postprocessing is easy and rampant…The result is briefly beguiling to the senses but ultimately annoying to the soul, like fake breasts or MSG-rich food.”
Encountering this, I realized the malaise felt may have stemmed from the artifice of preservation, be it of foods, or sounds, or lifespans. The recording session for Foreword and Two-Handed Storytelling was done, as is the practice, “dry,” without electronics. In total probably twice the amount of time was spent in post for Foreword than actually recording it. The oddness of the package experience was only abated by the fact that all three of us were complicit in its oddness.
In Foreword, when the return of the clomping figure arrives at the very end, one hopes it is not just to satisfy a formal demand, or some sort of faked nostalgia. Rather, it puts forth a Freudian question about the surplus value of so much luxury. We wonder not whether the emotions in the utopic vision are true, but rather whether we can and are willing to sustain those forever. The very last measure is marked by a sudden switching-off of the electronics, leading to the abrupt disintegration of the “click-clack” figure, like a sudden withdrawal of life support.
In the epilogue of Andrei Rublëv, a sudden cut to the real Rublëv’s extant icons jars our dormant cone cells awake: only then do we recall, or even notice, that we have been watching a black-and-white film for the past three hours. But then, as Robert Bird has noted, the moment sets the camera “in direct relation to the work of the icon-painter, as if testing to see if it can measure up.” [1] Colorless, moving life is given over to color-filled, frozen images. The final scene, lasting a mere twenty seconds, shows a quartet of horses in the distance on a stormy day.
Tarkovsky himself said of this:
“I’d like to point out the film ends with an image of horses in rain. It is a symbolic image as horse for me is a synonym of life. When I’m looking at a horse I have a feeling I’m in direct contact with the essence of life itself. Perhaps it’s because horse is a very beautiful animal, friendly to man, and is moreover so characteristic of the Russian landscape. There are many scenes with horses in Rublov [sic]. Take the scene in which a man dies after an unsuccessful attempt to fly. A sad-looking horse is a silent witness to the scene. The presence of horses in the last, final scene means that life itself was the source of all of Rublov’s art.” [2]
But this is life tempered by artifice. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has spoken of Tarkovsky’s frequent use of torrential “ciné-rain,”
“What rain! Antediluvian, unbelievably heavy rain, time to bang together Noah’s ark! Life is beaten down by this rain, and those silent horses are washed up, and the Rublev frescoes are washed away, and nothing remains.” [3]
In creating my strange Mazeppa-fantasy, I was perverting horses from a symbol of life to one of imminence. Perhaps there can be so much life that one needs a salve or screen for its excess. The end of Foreword could be as much horse clomps as falling rain. This seems not far off from the types of concerns with which Stark is engaged with these days–a sick environment, human destruction, and governmental fictions. He intended Foreword to prepare an audience for the types of long durational listening demanded of Stockhausen’s 70-minute-long Mantra. As such, Foreword has an edifying function: to freeze rhythm—to distance it into an icon—in order to awaken our potentials for spectatorship and reflection. ⫷ [Sep 17, 2019]
[1] Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2008); [2] “Fil’m o Rublëve,” Publitsistika: v trekh tomakh (Iaroslavl’, 1997) III, 167.; [3] Michel Ciment, Luda & Jean Schnitzer, “L’artiste dans l’ancienne Russie et dans l’URSS nouvelle: Entretien avec Andrei Tarkovsky,” Positif 109 (Oct 1969), 1-13.
