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.
