The Premier

Stefan, let us call him, was esteemed amongst the ranks of the moderns, or those who at least purported to really appreciate the high abstraction of cutting edge modernity in music. He was a musicians musician. One who even amongst other composers of such music was esteemed. It may have only been a provincial arts festival in a small town somewhere on the coast of England, but it was a premier. A premier of his most recent creation; a soul wrenched fusion of his deep inner being. His music. His setting. His film. His editing. His playing. His fusion of vision and sound into an abstraction of intellect. 

Eleanor, let us call her, was proud, very proud of having brought this premier to the town, to its arts starved populace, especially to those few amongst them who could aspire to truly appreciate such work. There were more populist events in this years festival, stuff that less informed minds could appreciate, but this, this was the pinnacle. The commissioning and bringing to the town of this premier was her crowning glory. This was for her above all others, something on the intellectual level at which she felt at home, her reward for all the hard work of organising, cajoling persuading, booking, bullying, encouraging, chivvying, and just down right flattering potential contributors to make something of the towns annual arts festival; to shine a little light in the otherwise bleak desert of this culturally abandoned corner of England. There was some hope. The work might fall on some ears worthy of appreciating it ; might throw them a life line of intellectual stimulation; might give them a glimpse of what the human mind could achieve at its zenith: one could but try.

The town, mostly a post-Thatcherite social-security-ville, did try; or at least the washed up scattering of long since graduates of art schools, collages, institutes and other academies, now in their latter years of their not necessarily too successful carers, or passing into gentile semi-retirement and dilettantish indulgence of their fancies, did try. They appreciated the arts. When young they had been exposed to them, had viewed and listened to them, had attended events, opening, galleries, shows, had even themselves taken part. They remembered the echo through their lives of those events, and how they had made them feel sophisticated, on the edge, modern, creative, engaged. The arts were worth having – a least for one whole week every year.

The towns cinema come theatre come general auditorium opened its doors in the hope of a good sized audience to this crowning event. Stefan was to give a talk first to warm them up, then the showing of earlier, more collaborative works and finally the premier itself. He was more than willing to talk and talk at length about his art, and especially about this most recent child of his mind. He knew it was a demanding work; knew it the audience would need priming; knew that it perhaps only a few would really be able to open themselves to its complexity, to find the depths within, to yield to its hidden profundity. Such work is not for all.

The showing of the first half of the programme had created some mild appreciation amongst the thinly scattered audience. Challenging, but there had been bits that were, well, almost comprehensible; and if you made the effort there were the odd moments that were almost engaging. The film editing made some sort of sense and did, at points, relate to the music; although it did wonder, as did much of the music. There were shots that clearly marked it out as 'film as art' because they were so badly focussed and lingered so very long on nothing in particular. It was also surprising just how many ways there were of striking, hitting, scratching and banging a cello to make some sort of sound without actually fully sounding the strings.

Then came the premier.

The creator of it all accompanied parts of the film on the cello – well, at least he scrapped, plucked, banged and sounded it. There was no real discernible pattern to the havoc of sounds produced save what may have been the essential element of there not being any discernible pattern. 

Then the film progressed to its peak – a long inaudible sound poem looped around and around set against the multiple projection of offset repeated clips from home movies, the element of both occurring again and again and again. An effect was not unrecognisable to any child of the '60s who had over-indulged in hallucinogenics whilst attending a three day rock festival. A case of making the incomprehensible incomprehensible due to the complete scrambling of any sense of time or place. At least some of the audience may have had flashbacks to earlier and somewhat disquieting experiences of their miss-spent youth. The rest may have recalled rain filled day trips to Margate from their childhood and that sense of absolute interminability. 

This apparently perpetually prolonged peak summoned forth a new sound from the composer and his cello – an atonal drone of prolonged strokes each flowing into the next at indeterminate lengths: an attempt at immense, impenetrable profundity.

We can only guess what was experienced by those few scattered souls of the audience, if anything as positive as an "experience" can be thought to have occurred in response to such a loop tape overplayed continuum of sound and sight. A spreading numbness. A sense of the slow slipping away of the will to live. An increased awareness of the meaning of the words “chasmic void”.

After the performance the audience did not so much leave as creep out hoping that no-one would see them. It had ended, but so had something vital in them. There was a definite avoidance of each others eyes and a sense of needing to flee. The great premier was clearly too profound for the likes of mere mortals such as they. 

Later some were heard trying to savage crumbs of self-esteem from the wreckage of their intellectual pride – they really had, on reflection, found something in this moment or that – something not quite statable, but something non-the-less – and were definitely working on trying to relate to the rest. It had been challenging – but then aren't advanced works meant to be demanding? Surely the apparent incomprehensibility was just a lack of effort, or preparedness, of understanding on their part?

Eleanor had publicly praised Stefan for allowing the humble folk of nowhere-special to share the experience of being the first to view and hear this masterpiece, and had expressed the hope that many more could be brought to watch it, to experience it, to savour it. She begged for permission to show it again and again during the rest of the festival. 

Stefan must have been becoming aware from the depths of her over-enthusiasm that all had not gone well. The catatonic exit of the remains of the audience may have also added to his slowly sinking sense of despair. Years, years of work had gone into the making of this, to perfecting the art, to shaping, to forming, to honing the skills of sound making, of fitting image to sound and sound to image, to creating at the deepest level. Now in the darkening of the day there was only the emptiness of the abandoned theatre, the loneliness of his boardinghouse bedroom and the silence of the still sea becalmed into complete motionless by the doldrums of the coming night. 

He packed away his cello in its case, and, with relief, found his hand resting on the comfort of that bottle of vodka he kept in its recesses. A memory from home. A solace of despair. An abandonment of hope. 

He made his way along the front to the beckoning of a dark shelter. There he sat and retrieved the bottle from the cello case and opened it. Much later he dragged himself and the case down towards the waters edge. He felt so tired, so exhausted, so in need of lying down. In his hazy mind he was aware that the sea might take away his prized cello, so he carried it over to a drawn up dingy and lifted it in, opened the case, and retrieved the bottle once more. For some reason something made him untie the rope that secured the dingy. The cello would be safe there in the boat. He had the bottle and his despair. What more did he need?

He staggered on further into the dark away from the meanness of that town, sticking close to the edge of the water. He did remember a tripping feeling and a dull thud as he slumped into to bottom of a rowing boat. He did remember floundering to stand up, caching hold of a length of rope fixed to one end of the boat and, somehow, unhooking it from the edge of the boat. Then came the bliss of slipping into deep unconsciousness.

Next morning, with a sense of hangover and seasickness, he blearily awoke still awkwardly curled in the bottom of a rowing boat, but aware of a gentle rocking motion. Painfully he dragged his eyes up to the level of the side of the boat. Nothing. Nothing to see at all, just flat grey water and flat grey mist, the two almost indistinguishable from each other, and that dull sense of rocking. He did have the feeling that there was a considerable depth of water under him and that there was definitely no sign or sound of any shore. He became aware that the boat was drifting.

Hours past hours and the greyness above remained unyielding. His phone showed no sign of getting a signal. It indicated that its battery was charged but nothing else. He wondered just how far out to sea he must have floated. The little rowing boat had no ores or rudder. Nothing. All he could do was drift and hope. 

Later a slight breeze began to make the sea choppy. Out of the mist he heard a distant sound, slight, but also vaguely familiar. It was uneven and monotonous. There was something resonant, as if a sounding box was involved. Over and over again, the same dull sound of what might have been rope drawn over something taught producing a faintly disharmonious drone. Sometimes there was something suggestive of dragging over a sound box. On and on went these sound for hours. Now clearly. Now indistinct. Intermittent. Unearthly.

The sound was becoming maddening to Stefan. It scrapped on his nerves as he tried to hear beyond it, longing for the distant sound of a motor, for some craft that might betoken his rescue. But nothing but those odd sounds against the background noise of the sea and those of his own frail craft. Nothing. The sounds dug deeper and deeper into him, haunting him – he, whose ears were so finely attuned to music, to sounds, to their possibilities and interweaving complexity. The sea, the faint creaking of his boat and those intermittent, distant, peculiar, resonating sounds, as if made by a ghostly cello struck now and then by something drawn across it. He began to have forebodings that they were in some way his obituary.

He was found the next day, delirious and on the verge of death faintly crying to himself in the bottom of the rowing boat. Close by was a small sailing dingy rocking gently in the sea, its boom arm now and again swaying from side to side trailing a loose rope down into its body wherein lay an open cello case with a cello exposed string side up.