Collaboration with Mariana Bernoski.

At a recent performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, the memory and stamina of the performer Andreas Schiff was such that the second movement of Beethoven Piano Sonata Opus 111 was presented as an encore. The performer was making a point. The movement represents the sublimation of variation technique to a higher level of expression than the larger, more architecturally ambitious variations sets, regarding by many as the highest acheivement in that form.

Opus 111, on the other hand, was the last music, along with the Bagatelles, that the composer wrote for the piano. He was stone deaf. How does someone, even with an inner ear as well developed as Beethoven, write such extradorinary music without being able to hear it?

The answer, I think, is in the realm of mind (counterpoint) and body (resonance). As these are the two primary areas of focus in my own music production, I hesitate to make this claim, concerned that I am seeing it only through my own myopic interests. I am convinced that there is no other reasonable explanation for how a deaf composer could project into the future an experience of the sublime in such an authoritative manner.

Looking at the score to Op. 111, Movement 2 (‘Arietta’), what leaps off the page is a lot of black. The tempo is slow and the subdivisions, as the pace increases in the variations, become a blur of beams and syncopes. It reminds me of the tendency with modernism to avoid the dull white emptiness of  half and whole notes and to set extremely slow tempi with an eighth or sixteenth notes ictus. It is the manner in which scores come to resemble scientific illustration – the ascendancy of rational man over his passionate, chaotic feeling self. The fact that such music is often fraught and tortured in actual performance is no matter – the score is an artifact to the composer’s intent to turn away from the irrational fever dream of the Romantic/Nationalist past. After the catastrophe in Europe in the middle Twentieth Century, who can blame them?

So, Beethoven is a precursor, with his complex syncopation and contrapuntal ingenuity the likes of which had never been achieved. It would all be schematic, an academic achievement, if it were not for the fact that he could feel the essence of the relationship between tone and thought in his vary bones. The advances made in Keyboard instruments in his lifetime created larger resonance than had ever been. While composing these counterpoints, he could have felt them by virtue of the memory held by his inner ear (sub-vocalised memory) and the physical feeling produced at the keyboard. At the end of the variations, there is a series of trills that holds the audience in a moment of suspension unlike anything I’ve experienced in the concert hall. It is an ascension to the heavens, something that surely must have occupied the elder man in his late life, but it is also a palpable vibration that must have been physically perceptible to Beethoven. I can just imagine him in his studio, trilling away on a hammerclavier all day, just to get the feel of it in his bones and saying ‘If I can compose something I can hear, then I damn well will compose something I can feel’.

This, then is the essence of what I am speaking about when I explain my theory of resonant compostition, or overtonality.